“I went through changes, I am now 40, but I think the same ingredient inside me still exists, a desire to go out into the world and reveal the magic. It's the same as with writing, photography, filming; to be around, to be connected, with myself and the world around me. It’s enough.”

“You need to be a dreamer, you need to dream, because dreaming means using your imagination, making up things, things that doesn’t exist. You make up a journey, a life – you invent a life and then you go towards it …”

“I always felt that this is the biggest treasure, fortune I can have; to invent things, to have ideas, to imagine a project, a way of life, and then go for it.”

“This is also what I try to do with photography, to find this kind of magic that lies behind the things, behind the obvious. And to go there. It’s a vehicle, like writing, photography, filming ... Like the colours of a painter – he uses the colours, the shapes to go beyond. Photography, writing, filming, they are all tools, a passport.”

“As a child, on the island, I had a really nice childhood I think, because I was playing in the streets, playing football – I love the football – and games, adventures … But already at that age, I felt there is beauty, magic in a different way. But I think of this childish behaviour more in the sense of a game, to play games, this is important for me … "Games" … It’s a different word in Greek, English doesn’t function … But to see life as a play; to be playful in life, that’s the right word. This kind of ability is very important for me, and I have it from my childhood, and somehow I try to keep it. Now, when I am grown up, it is a kind of playfulness towards life.”

Growing up on the island “is linked to the body, to senses … It’s all organic … It’s an identity that I grew up on the island, it’s a part of who I am, and I think it is mostly the island that gave me these virtues: to be organic with the things, to be instinctive, to be spontaneous, to be playful. I think it all comes from my childhood on the island. I don’t know what would happen if I had grown up in a city. Here, we didn’t have technology; I didn’t have computer until I was 20.”

“Growing up on the island also affects my creativity, it cannot be otherwise. If you want to create, you need to make use of what you are; your memories, your ideas, your philosophy, your aesthetics, your passions. This is the material that you work with. And most of this material comes from the childhood.”

Without playfulness, “life becomes very severe, very strict, you cannot move, you carry the burden. But if you’re playful, you move more easily. Whenever I feel I think seriously about life, I don’t function well.”

“I grew up in Kampus, I have memories, that’s why I returned to do a book. And nevertheless, I was travelling around and discovering new things for three years. So I like the fact that I keep discovering things on the island, it’s not finished for me. That's why I return to this island every time. I also like the scenery.

“Development. For me, there is only spiritual development. So in terms of the society and the land, it is always to feel connected with the natural resources, to have less, always less, never exaggerate about things. It’s the notion in Greece about not to excess yourself. Excess is terrible thing in terms of society. So my notion of development is to develop the activities and the production in order to serve your inner needs and your spirituality, to serve your potentials personally, to grow in the place that you’re living. We are living in traumatic, terrible decline of culture, education and spirituality. For me, we’re like in the time of barbarism, and I think the worst is yet to come for the societies of the world. Because we reached the end of the extinction; we are here now. In 20 years, this place will be a burden to live, for sure, we're gonna see the destruction coming, we're gonna see the end of the world. And maybe that’s a good thing, because this culture, it came to an end. We don’t have nothing else to show … I mean the people that are in power. They are very powerful still, so there is no space for revolution, for changing things. I feel this civilisation is coming to an end. And hopefully something new will arise, more beautiful.

“In everything that I do, it is important to get inside the situation, to open up a window to a new world, to an unknown world; it’s like discovering a new land, so it’s like waiting in a place, but knowing very little about this place. And then I start slowly to go around, to wander around this place, thinking, writing, visualising, imagining, creating fictions in the reality I face. I’m an explorer, I want to explore a new land. So the project has to have this kind of potential, otherwise I don’t go for it. All of my projects so far had this; I discover a new land ... This time, it's Kampus, I explore memory, and with this film, I want to do it in this house for seniors. There is death and old people, isolation and loneliness, I want to get inside of these concepts. So every time, it's like a world and ingredients that constitute this world that I want to research. (And every time, it should be different: all my photography projects are very different, but also the same).”

“Practical changes? For me, the would be ideal if we would decentralise the power and change the whole structure of the politics, it’s very important. To have small communities like Chios become one state, to be able to control their own faith on the island. People know the needs of the island. To revive the agriculture economy and to transform the production kind of model into a kind of vision that’s closer to the character and the landscape and the sprit of Greece. Let's face it, the Greeks cannot be Germans, to produce machines, cars. It would be ideal to have a different way of life, outside of this neoliberalistic capitalism. People living in small communities, producing their own stuff, living in solidarity, creating their own products. To open up to tourism, but in a different sense, not to bring the tourists to consume their products, but to bring them to appreciate the different way of life. And all this production needs to be accommodated with the cultural needs, and start to bring the Greek philosophy back to life, the poetry in Greece, the culture, the art, and to make Greece a model of this different way of life. To live in small communities, to eat good food, products, to talk about philosophy, to be creative in terms of arts. To do your own business, but in a different kind of sense, one that is very close to the nature and to the inner rhythm of the nature, and to the inner rhythm of oneself as well. So, to create this kind of models of existence, to work together with other people and to be connected with the nature. It can be done on the islands, it can be done everywhere in Greece. But we need a radical change in the way power is organised, in the notion of democracy, how the political system functions, how is it possible to organise things not from the up to the bottom but from the bottom up. I mean, that’s my hope, that’s my dream. But I don’t see it happening.”

“In the future of Caravan project, it could be a good idea to be run as the festival, once a year, like a storytelling festival, to have movies about the people, about youth, and have our educational programmes based on these stories, for children to come and do this programmes, and then train others to document and reveal their own stories in the communities where they live, and hopefully create a kind of open architectural material, also with the caravan people. So we can then use this material to build an art residency, where people come and work on this material, collect it. So the idea is to build this kind of structure, where people go to a place and start wandering around, collecting elements of this place, and observing ... Taking pieces of what constitutes the character of the place they are visiting. And then trying to move one step further, and to see what we can do with these stories, with this material. That could hopefully also be through an artist residency programme, because we want to communicate and open the bridges with other people, so they can see the land with different eyes. For example, a Slovenian artist comes, and we tell him: 'We have these stories, this material, we have this and that … What you can make?' It’s like clay, like pottery.”