The island: from life abroad

Danae Kamitsi returns to Patmos through a photographic narrative of memory, distance and nostalgia

There are places which, even when we leave them behind, continue to exist within us. Places that are transformed over time, becoming memories, images, emotions. Patmos is such a place for Danae Kamitsi, who, through her new photographic exhibition ‘The Island: From Exile’, explores the relationship between departure and return, presence and absence.

The exhibition is on display at the Old Primary School in Ηora, Patmos, from 26 July to 3 August, and is open from 19:30 to 22:30.

The starting point for this work lies in a personal experience: leaving Patmos eight years ago and beginning a new life in France. The distance between the two places — ‘here’ and ‘there’ — becomes the space within which the images are born. The experiences, sensations and traces of the island are gathered during visits back to Greece and creatively transformed in France, through the filter of memory and nostalgia.

This photographic narrative does not set out to present an objective picture of Patmos. Rather, it explores the way in which a place changes as it is shaped by absence, time and emotion. The real meets the imaginary, and memory becomes a new way of inhabiting a place. The works in the exhibition, the result of a four-year creative journey, are imprints of returns and inner journeys. Each image holds something of the island, but also something of the distance that surrounds it.

The exhibition ‘The Island: From Exile’ invites visitors to encounter Patmos not merely as a geographical location, but as a lived experience: an island that remains alive in the memory, at times real and at times dreamlike.

• The photographs here are cropped versions of the original photographs.