ADAD BOOKS - A Sunday Morning at the Bookstore
A Sunday Morning at the Bookstore & The 7 Best Books to Read This Fall
For avid readers around the world, fall officially jumpstarts the magical time when they find a beautiful corner to curl up in and dive into the pages of a book, inhaling the distinctive smell of printed paper mingled with hot coffee. A new hot meeting point for the bookworms of downtown Athens and beyond, is definitely Adad Books, the beautiful book café that has just opened in the neighbourhood of Petralona. Books on visual arts, coffee-table books and magazines from independent local and European publishing houses -London, Paris and Brussels-, a small inspiring library corner dedicated to the arts, specialty coffee and a fine variety of wines, is just a small taste of what you can find in this store.
We paid them a visit recently, so if you’re trying to figure out which books to read this season, we have got you covered!
The Architect is Absent | Approaching the Cycladic Holiday House, Kyklàda Press, 2021
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.
I Called Her Lisa Marie
Photographs: Clémentine Schneidermann
Text: Clémentine Schneidermann & Johnny B.Goode
Liz named her daughter Lisa Marie, just like Elvis Presley’s daughter. French photographer Clémentine Schneidermann met Liz in Newport, Wales, a few miles away from the world’s largest festival to “the king”. Each year Liz joins tens of thousands of fans at the seaside resort of Porthcawl to celebrate the life and music of their icon, Elvis Presley.
From 2013 to 2017, Schneidermann joined too, creating portraits of fans Alison and her son, Steve, Samantha and Ian – among many others, for her series I Called her Lisa Marie. Schneidermann spent a lot of time with these people, using her camera to capture the poignancy of this flamboyant gathering where the life and music of the king offers a moment of solace.
The dramatic tension in Schneidermann’s work springs from the counterpoint of the bright neon lights, gaudy costumes and brazen commerciality of the cult of Elvis in Memphis with the post- industrial banality of its transatlantic iteration in Wales. Inevitably, melancholy occasionally appears amidst the beauty of these photographs.
Schneidermann is based in Cardiff, and travelled with the Alison and her son from Wales to where it all began in Memphis. She met the pair at the festival, where Alison’s son was performing under the stage name Johnny B. Goode. Schneidermann documented their pilgrimage across the Atlantic, creating Johnny B. Goode, a visual travel diary that is presented with I Called her Lisa Marie here in her first monograph.
Greek Folk Songs
Translated by Joshua Barley, With a Foreword by A.E. Stallings, Aiora Books
The Greek folk songs—Dimotika Tragoudia in Greek— are songs of the Greek countryside, from island towns to mountain villages. They have been passed down from generation to generation in a centuries-long oral tradition, lasting until the present. They are songs of every aspect of old Greek life: from love songs and ballads, to laments for the dead, to songs of travel and brigands. Written down at the start of the nineteenth century, they are the first works of modern Greek poetry, playing a crucial role in forming the country’s modern language and literature. Still known and sung today, they are the Homer of modern Greece.
This new translation brings the songs to an English readership for the first time in over a century, capturing the lyricism of the Greek in modern English verse.
I was visited by a friend of the modern Greeks, who had with him some folk songs of that people, the most beautiful of all known to us from the point of view of lyric, dramatic and epic poetry. Yet these are folk songs!
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [letter to his son, 1815]
Morning Comes Without Warning
Stephen Dean, 2020, Bandini Books
The new publication by Bandini Books, Morning Comes Without Warning, presents a series of watercolors by Stephen Dean. Produces by the french-american artist during the 90's in New York, city where he works and lives, the publication has 20 special editions with an original painting by the artist.
If you've seen it all, close your eyes
Coco Capitan
“If you’ve seen it all, close your eyes” presents extracts from a decade of artist Coco Capitán’s handwritten notebooks. Coco Capitán has always scribbled down her thoughts – everywhere, all the time. From her first day in London in 2010 until now, and as she travels the world on photography assignments, Coco Capitán’s writings grant an insight into her free and instinctive creative process. Playful aphorisms and short poems address an array of issues with hints of humour and irony. She combines the serious with the mundane as she shares in her first text-based book social, metaphorical or sentimental moments with her witty tone and distinctive hand.
Hilaria - Récits intimes pour un féminisme révolutionnaire
Irene Vrose, Les édition Burn~Août
Feminism has always stressed the importance of the intimate narrative. By combining family stories, political theories and historical facts, Irene draws from the life of Hilaria, her grandmother, weapons to equip contemporary feminist movements. Hilaria is a Basque proletarian woman, a widow, who raises her children alone. The tragedy and chaos of their lives in the 1930s will never overpower their joy of living and their desire to build a desirable world.
They are an inspiration for our time, when fascism is once again at the gates of power in Europe. Since the democratisation of a reformist and liberal feminism will not help us, we must return to Hilaria’s feminism, a popular feminism that is at once anarchist, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and anti-carcenary.
Panicle Paintings
Navine G. Dossos
Navine G. Khan – Dossos’ geometric art comforts and provokes, drawing inspiration as much from the full sweep of Islamic traditions as well as from the digital realm. Working between London and Athens, her art treats geometry not as an abstraction but as something essentially informational, a social commentary. Her most recent composition, Panicle Paintings, is a series of fifteen portraits of parents who gave birth during the pandemic. They appear as palms and several other symbolic and fantastical trees derived from Sumerian seal scrolls and Mesopotamian that symbolise fertility and childbirth. The dreaded coronavirus sits harmoniously beside emblematic motifs in a sort of Fibonacci sequence, forcing us to contemplate the divine and the mundane, as indeed this pandemic has.
Source: Athens Insider
