They left Greece to survive;
They left a part of them in Greece.
A memoir from my last summer in a place I love to hate and hate to love.
Every boat leads to a new island and a new island to another boat.
The president declared a war on non-profitability, turned islands into consumption industries, and us into a colony. Gentrification and over-tourism are new forms of colonization: we work like slaves to be on vacation for at most 10 days, or we work like slaves on an island just to be there.
Five years ago, they criminalized free camping, transforming the last Cycladic islands that weren’t so touristically advanced into alternative destinations: private expensive clamping, hipster cocktails by the beach, new age simplistic lucrative bungalows. Like in every area all over the world that has been gentrified, they moved away the people that made the history of the space and now sell this history as a form of experience: they sell the product without its essence.
And we, we only have to fight.
Non-Cycladia is a project I developed last year doing free camping all over Greece. It is more like a personal memoir of a landscape that softly dies, of a community that the state sees as an enemy, of a war between tourism, capitalist liberalism, and the forces that oppose it.
