“Mineral Travels: Fragments of Geographies on the Move”, is a talk by Lydia Xynogala (Athens/Zurich) to announce a new book in the kyklàda.press series: BODIES OF EXTRACTION, Underneath the Ground of Islands. 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.
The book contains contributions by Aslí Özdoyuran, Lorena Vicini, Lydia Xynogala, Milica Ivić, Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir, David Bergé, and Constantinos Speras. The production of this book was in part supported by Goethe-Institut Athen.
Lydia Xynogala is an architect and scholar working in Zurich and Athens and a doctoral fellow at ETH Zurich. In her practice she constructs architecture, landscapes, objects and stories. Her work engages built artefacts and their material trails questioning their role in historical and environmental narratives.
kyklàda.press is a small imprint, a series of books made in Athens resonating with phenomena in the Aegean Archipelago, directed by David Bergé, and driven by a trans-disciplinary team, exploring critical and experimental positions in writing. Key words: archipelago topographies, human geography, archaeology of moods and emotions, experiences of urbanism, historical (dis)continuities, gender fluidity, non-patriarchy, material and corporeal writings, public health, and healing.

https://www.goethe.de/ins/gr/en/ver.cfm?event_id=24321055
https://kyklada.press/
https://alos.nyc/