On the first of September, the Hydra Book Club will again animate the island’s literary scene for the fourth season at the GSA/Historical Archives – Museum of Hydra, from September.1st until October 27th.

This survey of work by the nearly 100 years of an uninterrupted literary scene on Hydra is the foundation of the exhibition. Each year, a thematic selection creates context to provoke a new interpretations, and to challenge and stimulate visitors.

The presentation includes an exciting mix of new, vintage, and exceptional rare editions. Last year, the founder and creator of the Hydra Book Club, Josh Hickey presented Hydra as a pretext, an archetype intended to be a symbol of an idealized world – a utopia. This year, he choose to confront the joy, the absurdity, the amusement, the anticipation, the expectation, the nostalgia, the destruction, the chaos, the obligation, the expense, the sacrifice, the liminality, the escapism, the colonialism, the parties, and the friendships that form the structure of this parentheses of time we call vacation.

In the 1930s, the painter Nikos Hadjikyriakos Ghikas began inviting Greek and international artists and writers to his family home on the hillside atop the village of Kamini. He was passionate about creating a place and time where friendships would flourish, and great works of art would be birthed. This was the origin of the cultural community which still exists on the island. We could say the nearly one hundred years of Hydra’s artistic and literary scene started with a vacation. We are together on vacation, floating serenely in the ever-changing waters of the Saronic Gulf.

The practice of vacation today most often involves travel – a voluntary, planned, and often joyous movement which becomes more troubling when set into a contemporary context of the involuntary, unplanned movements of populations across the Mediterranean (and the world) and the distressed environment which strains to support increasing numbers of tourists. As we repeat a summer holiday, as we leave and return, we underline the passing of time, and memory blurs into melancholy. The choreographed movement of boats coming in and out of the port reflect these emotions which I attempt to express through this new selection of contextual literature. A second volume of the Journal of the Hydra Book Club accompanies the exhibition with a new group of Greek and international contributors writing about “vacation”.

This annual Journal of fiction, poetry, essay and image enables co-editor Filip Niedenthal and I to engage with a range of writers, artists, curators, critics, and photographers both on and off the island of Hydra.