(Forced) Movement

The white cubical house, the vernacular architecture in the Aegean Archipelago, knows no author. Its capacity to resist harsh climatic and topographic circumstances has been improved and adjusted through time and seems today close to perfection. The white-washed Cycladic House has become iconic to the image of Greece through the construction of national and tourism narratives. What happens when an architect steps into this process of anonymous transmission of skills? In 1966 music composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis articulated a response to this tradition and designed, from his base in Paris, a holiday house on the island of Amorgos while choosing to remain absent throughout the construction process.

CONTENTS

Constructing through Absence
by Hulya Ertas

Meteorites
by Mâkhi Xenakis

Summer Home for François-Bernard Mâche by Iannis Xenakis, 1966–74
by Sharon Kanach

Villa Mâche: a harsh hijack against the space of the sun
by David Bergé

Traveling to the Cyclades: Modernist Projections
by Dimitra Kondylatou

Iannis Xenakis, Selected Projects from Critical Index
by Sven Sterken

Aggressively rebounding after recessions and the pandemic, sprawling landscapes of tourism in the Mediterranean continue to build upon the iconic spatial typology of sea & sun vacationing: the beach. But behind the leisurely scattered bodies and the quiescent summer shores, beachfronts are assembled as intensely ordered infrastructures for the heavy machineries of tourism.

Approaching the beach as an operational socio-technical landscape, this book unpacks stories of construction, programming, and maintenance: from traces of moving sands in Lefkada island to mirror postwar developments in Delos and Mykonos islands, and from historic and bodily excursions to workings of the Athenian riviera to rituals of eco-certification under Blue Flags.

The texts frame the beach as a machine, one with protocols of function and metabolic needs, studying how it directs the capture of land and bodies, while establishing forms of environmental control. As a repeatable and proliferating type of infrastructure space, the beach has the potential to expose parallel evidence of seeming globalizations and patchy planetarities.

Contents:

Flying Flags, Fixing Sands
by George Papam

Moving Sands: Ammoglossa
by Eleni Grapsa

Delos Symposia
and Delos LTD:
Making Global Leisurescapes
by Petros Phokaides

Beach Making:
The Naked Body on the Rocks
by Phevos Kallitsis

Beach Effect
by Hannah Freed-Thall

Hello Hygiene:
A Guide for Bathers
by Lydia Xynogala

Tourism does more than transforming spaces and forcing emotions: its geographies also conceal a persisting power that captures the imagination. In their operational sturdiness, tourismscapes appear intractable and inert, making their alternative renderings almost unthinkable. It feels uncanny to picture islands and their coasts freed from programs of leisure. But in recent years, the exhaustion of people and landscapes has brought forth a renewed imperative to think outside this ubiquitous extractive industry. Through essays, pieces of fiction, and visual references, this book discusses both the difficulty and the necessity of disrupting the monocultural imaginations of tourism. To escape the devouring vortex of its sticky nature and messianic promises, the cultural and political work necessary is not only this of negation and resistance, but also that of bold re-conceptualizations and re-imaginings.

A new edition of Anzaldúa's classic text.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a 1987 semi-autobiographical work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa that examines the Chicano and Latino experience through the lens of issues such as gender, identity, race, and colonialism. Borderlands is considered to be Anzaldúa’s most well-known work and a pioneering piece of Chicana literature.

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a border' is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

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.

Contents:

Mineral Travels:
Fragments of Geographies on the Move
by Lydia Xynogala

The Evil in the Surface
by Lorena Vicini

Consuming Land at Serifos
by Asli Özdoyuran
and David Bergé

Letter from Frikas Fortress
by Constantinos Speras

Iron Lungs
by Milica Ivic

Walking on Marble: Materialized Histories
by Anna Run Tryggvadottir

Bootleg edition by Cutt Press. 

Foreword by Gloria Anzaldua.

Drawing on religion, mythology, folklore, anthropology, history and the arts, this encyclopoedia is a collection of queer spirit. It contains articles on the world's spiritual traditions; entries on deities, symbols, spiritual teachers, spiritually focused artists; and related subjects.

Did you know that in medieval French folklore a person might change sex by passing under a rainbow? Or that same-sex unions have been celebrated by peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, Africa, China, and indigenous America? Or that Sappho, da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, Nijinsky, Benjamin Britten, Mishima, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Keith Haring, Boy George, and Derek Jarman number among those who have explored the spiritual dimension of gender and sexuality in their works? While the terms many of us employ today to identify ourselves – ‘queer’, ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgendered’ – differ markedly from those of peoples of other times and places, we are nevertheless the bearers of a rich spiritual history that has been ignored or suppressed, a history encoded in sacred texts as well as in works of art, music, dance and other media. Drawing upon religion, mythology, folklore, anthropology, history and the arts, the Encyclopedia is a cornucopia of queer spirituality, containing over 1,500 alphabetically arranged entries from Aakulujjuusi to Zeus.

The theme of this issue of Pages was triggered by the idea of opium smoke as a ‘writing machine.’ Since the early opium trade, there has been writing not only on opium, but also through opium, especially in countries linked to past and present drug networks. In this issue we are tapping into the deeply rooted relationship between writing and drugs, especially beyond the Western literary tradition, and wondering about the current conceptual and material derivatives of intoxication with which we can machinate new extremities in our chemical, historical and technological relations to the world.

With contributions by:

- Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh / Smoke, Drug, Poison: A Philosophy of the Faramoosh-Khaneh (Opium Den)
- Pages / Dissolving, Mixing, Melting, Stirring (the Smoke)
- Hung-Bin Hsu / The Taste of Opium: Science, Monopoly and the Japanese Colonization in Taiwan, 1895—1945
- Saleh Najafi / Hedayat: The Opium of Translation and Creating the Impossible Memory
- Patricia Reed / The Toxicity of Continuity
- Fuko Mineta / A Monster Appears in Qingtian
- Morad Farhadpour / Inside and Outside Addiction
- Mohammad-Ali Rahebi / Of Junk and Time: Trauma, Habit, Capitalism

A take away cup and a cloud is an essay written alongside the dance performance Seems to be by Denise Lim and Stina Ehn. It plays with a variety of containers–the list form being one. By mixing a personal with a historical gaze it traces the trajectory of mundane commodities and  the replacement of material with imaterial objects brought about to the everyday by technical progress.