Bodies of Extraction: Underneath the Ground of Islands by David Bergé and Milica Ivic (Eds.)

Description

What does it mean to drill deep and interfere with the configuration of tectonic plates? What does it mean to hollow out and alienate islandic undergrounds? How is wealth extracted and exploited from the ground, crumbled into fragments, transformed into matter, pieces of power, moved away to be represented elsewhere? Whose lungs and souls are capitalized upon and hidden under the suffocating dust in mining shafts? To whom do the surface of the land and its underground belong? This book takes proto-industrial mining in the Aegean island of Serifos as an entry point for disclosing historical and contemporary consequences of politics of the soil through land extraction, and looks at how mineral evidence was historically produced, disseminated, and capitalized upon in the Aegean region and beyond.

kyklàda.press is a series of compact books initiated by artist David Bergé and grounded in the Aegean archipelago, the island group marked by Izmir, Athens, and Crete. A publishing experiment in embodied, critical, and material forms of writing, each kyklàda book emerges from an expansion within and beyond one central theme. Five to six contributors from different practices craft each book together, relaying knowledge derived from lived experiences on islands: archaeologies of moods, expressions of desire and grief, affection and pain, constructed landscapes, human geographies, and historical (dis)continuities.