Stratis Vogiatzis and caravan project was selected to be one of the seven European artists to participate to one month
artist residence in Gibelina Italy. The artists would work together, participate in workshops, research together and finally  produce a work regarding the issue of identity in Europe.

The project started its journey with an artistic residence (residency) implemented in Gibellina, Sicily, an island which lies on the southern border of Europe and has become a symbol of mass migration flows affecting the whole of the Mediterranean. The result was Residency, an exhibition that includes works of seven artists, among which the Greek photographer Stratis Vogiatzis. Federica Bardelli & Alex Piacentini (IT), Claudio Beorchia (IT), Angélica Dass (BR / ES), Simone Sapienza (IT), Zamir Suleymanov (AZ) and Stratis Vogiatzis (GR) were selected by a scientific committee in which all institutions engaged in the program were participating, following an international call, which received 118 proposals from 31 countries. Once the production completed, in collaboration with the Fondazione Orestiadi, the exhibition was presented in Malaga, Spain. In Thessaloniki, Residency Exhibition takes place in the space of Pier A of the Thessaloniki Port Authority, between June 30 and July 17, 2016.

Identity is never a fixed condition: rather, it is a flow constantly crossing the pathways of everyday life, an unstable state of the subject, a product of interactions and relations.

Through the work of young artists and photographers – their images installed in the public space in three cities laying on the European southern border – Urban Layers has tried to rediscover identity’s potential as an essential bridge between other regions and different cultures in the Mediterranean region, one of the key-areas of a Europe that has never been so much a work in progress. 

The entire journey of Urban Layers, without any pretence of arriving at univocal and final answers, provides interesting insights and testifies especially to the willingness to interact with a radically changing society, maintaining artistic research at the heart of the community as an essential manifestation of individual and collective growth.