In the plain of Chios, imposing mansions dominate the citrus groves that have been cultivated in the area for c. seven centuries. In the series Kampos (2017-2022), Stratis Vogiatzis assumes the role of an unusual narrator, guiding us through the region, combining images with texts, archives and objects, recording testimonies and recollections, creating images that are sometimes documents and sometimes the products of his own staging. In the same vein, the texts, by weaving experience with imagination and legend with history, reveal multiple, often unseen layers of reality, which are carefully hidden behind the walls surrounding the estates. This series listens attentively to the spirit of the place, its interactions with animals and the landscape, the infiltration of nature into culture and vice versa, in an increasingly intractable equation. Vogiatzis thereby creates, as he has put it, a series of “composted narratives”, activating, through an artful process, the fruitful recycling and merger of concepts and ideas about his homeland. His work is a probing examination of the complex, often enigmatic, culture of the Chios plain, which has undergone periods of both great economic prosperity and silent decline. Vogiatzis’ often melancholic venture into local history manages to avoid facile idealization, opting instead for a voyage through space and time that combines the sensory with the intuitive, visibility with invisibility. On another level, the series is a reflection on the thin, often permeable, boundary between document and fiction, between the realms of discourse and the photographic image and their seductive pairing.