Leros

It is the 15th of November, 1943, on the Greek island of Leros, and Lieutenant Colonel Jake Easonsmith has commanded the long-range desert group for barely a month.

Three days into a German invasion, the island has been cut in two.

German paratroopers hold the high ground at its centre.

Word of his death moves through the unit fast, even amid the chaos of a battle already being lost.

Bill Kennedy Shaw, who had helped build this unit from nothing back in the summer of 1940, will later write of Easonsmith that he was the finest man we ever had in the LRDG.

Three days after his death, the last defenders on Leros surrender.

The long-range desert group survived three years of war in open desert, a thousand miles from the nearest paved road, without losing a single commanding officer.

It takes ten weeks on a handful of small Greek islands to do what the whole North African campaign never managed.

And this month we have joining us Alex Maholy, who was born in Ravenna, Italy, in 1971 and attended the Art Institute in the town.

His career began to develop after he photographed the closing of the notorious insane asylum on the island of Leros in Greece, which resulted in his first monograph, Leros.

This arose due to his interest in the theories of Franco Basaglia, a pioneer of the modern concept of mental health, famous for having abolished psychiatric hospitals in Italy.

Maggioli's early interest in psychiatric care led him to Brazil, which marked the beginning of his 20-year-long ongoing project, a body of work documenting the multi-layered country and the extremes found in the darker side of its society.

Their guiding ideology was the enforcement of a Greek-Christian civilization, a remarkably elastic concept that demanded strict obedience and penalized dissent with terrifying efficiency.

political opponents found themselves rapidly exported off the mainland to harsh prison islands like Yaros and Leros.

King Constantine II thoroughly blindsided that April morning was forced under extreme duress to swear in the Junta cabinet.

He later attempted to regain control by launching a counter-coup from the northern city of Kavala on December 13, 1967.

But if you scratch under the surface, you will see that nothing is there.

Neni traces a historical legacy of containment on Leros, an island marked by overlapping infrastructural histories that have shaped its social and material fabric.

Overlapping infrastructural histories, overlap,

overlap, overlap, overlap, overlap, overlap.