Free Love Paid Love

Expressions of Affection in Mykonos

Nowhere in Cycladic culture has love been defined in a singular all-encompassing manner. Forces of attraction, affection, connection, and relation were ascribed in a plurality of ways. Through symposia in Delos, the tax haven of antiquity, 17th-century transactions of love involving pirates, slaves, and Mykonians; naturist communities reliving sexual freedom in the 1960-70s and 21st-century tourists quest in search of love, free or paid; this book gathers fragments of expressions of affection across Mykonos island. Mykonos has long defined itself as a self-ruling place far away from realities lived elsewhere.

kyklàda.press is a small imprint, a series of texts resonating with phenomena in the Aegean Archipelago. kyklàda.press is a publishing project in Athens, driven by a trans-disciplinary group of artists, exploring critical and experimental positions in writing. With each volume in this series, we are slowly forming a catalogue of liquid forms of modernity: corporeal bodies – historical and actual, real, and imaginative.