You will fell asleep and dream of the flower's song
Solo Show in Royal Artillery Factory, Seville, Mai 5 - September 20, 2026
Project funded by the Seville City Council, Department of Tourism and Culture
The exhibition reflects on the present through a contemporary reworking of the myth of the Lotus-Eaters from Homer’s Odyssey. It approaches Odysseus as a figure shaped by displacement and transformation. Altered by every island and encounter, his body becomes a site of accumulation—an identity continually rewritten by the journey. The exhibition asks what remains once movement, memory, and experience have transformed us.
Algaba constructs scenes in which the symbolic shipwreck of the contemporary individual unfolds. In He Created the Flowers to Have Worshippers (2026), the familiar geography of the Odyssey becomes unstable. The installation imagines the possibility that Odysseus’s journey may have crossed territories never registered by the canonical narrative: seas beyond the Western map and symbolic landscapes excluded by the Eurocentric construction of the myth. References associated with Greek and Roman antiquity coexist with visual elements drawn from Mayan cultures and different Asian traditions, creating a geography in which multiple cultural and temporal systems occupy the same narrative plane.
Within this landscape, Odysseus appears as a fragmented Roman ceramic doll, displaced from the centre of his own story. Falling from the bed-like vessel that structures the installation, his fall can also be understood as the collapse of a centralised narrative unable to contain cultural multiplicity: the hero has lost control over the linearity of his own epic.
This understanding of identity also appears in Hold the Serpent (2026), where lines connecting ornaments and vegetal forms can be read simultaneously as routes of a journey and as the submerged stems of an aquatic plant. Like the lotus, whose hidden structures sustain what becomes visible above the surface, these connections suggest an identity held together by cultural and affective fragments. References to the spiritual and cosmological significance of the flower across different Asian traditions blend with Latin American imagery to generate hybrid constellations.
In Algaba’s scenographic environments, the past ceases to function as a closed account that can simply be recovered. Instead, it becomes a material open to transformation. Through their restrained and often silent atmosphere, these spaces invite viewers to inhabit that instability and reconsider the narratives through which identity, history, and belonging are constructed.
