I open the door that keeps the rest of a dense night in gloom. The intense brightness of a clear and warm light instantly shrinks my pupils. Sunny morning, typical in this season of the year and this topical Mediterranean latitude. After the break of a frugal breakfast, we are ready to take a walk around the family home that welcomes us.

She guides me through the remains of what must have been an old road, flanked by some ancient cypresses, survivors of the ax of time. Just fifty meters away, we find an olive grove whose perimeter, in view of its protection, evokes the presence of a sacred site. Once inside, alone, we go towards the heart of it. We see among the contorted branches of their trees a small elevation of the ground. Accompany our steps the echo of the intense song of the birds and the yellow buzz of thousands of insects, busy in the feverish task that spring brings. In the center, and under a sun, stands a mound of earth, like a truncated cone, about ten meters high. From its summit, we both silently contemplate the landscape: deep blue of the sea, embraced by the broad plain of Marathon. They kiss on the infinite and whitish line of its beach, crowned by the majestic mountains that conceal Athens. We can smell the grass and an uproarious profusion of flowers, which flood my allergic nose with the strange pollen of the dead. Under our feet, heroic humus, a substantial tomb that houses the remains of 192 Athenian soldiers. Warriors who poured out their lives in a crucial battle. So distant and close at the same time.

Ten thousand Athenian soldiers against twenty-five thousand Persians. Fight that solved a long stage of tension between East and West, with the final victory - remembered for centuries - of the Greek army.

But there is something incongruous in its sepulchral silence. We have not learned anything. The paradox of civilization: we have evolved creating much more lethal instruments and developing an absolutely more indiscriminate and massive death. But the same primitive ambitious and aggressive mentality. The difference is that the "heroes" are obsolete, although they remind us repeatedly in the celluloid, simulation to appease the consciences and inflame the hearts by bellicose instinct, trying to justify the most absolute barbarism. And in the hands of power is the subtle difference that separates the concepts of hero or murderer ...

The reason in essence is eternal and simple: the greed of the alien.

At the foot of the burial mound, the date of the battle is written on a plaque: 490 BC, the morning of September 11.

In the same valley, a few kilometers from this mythical place, climbing the mountain, we find a similar space. But different in time and in its substance. A cemetery that houses the remains of one hundred thousand soldiers also killed in the battle. There is no glory. Only the stench of oblivion and the scent of defeat. But there is dignity. The dark honor of the one who has died uselessly. Youth wasted by the depravity produced by a machinery feverish by the madness of power and fanaticism. One hundred thousand Germans killed on Greek soil during World War II.

I do not believe that there is useful death, but useful existence. Although we can find reasons sublime or extreme enough to sacrifice life for it. I think that a dignified death can turn life into something useful and, on the contrary, a useless life turns death into something indifferent.

However, I do not believe that any war contains a justification deep enough to deliver the being. If we analyze its ultimate reason, it is usually the greed of the powerful.

We can continue contemplating every day the throbbing of a last and sad international contest. Sentiment accentuated by the lies of governments and their leaders, or by silence, which implies complicity. Obvious is the reason: the theft of oil and the profit of the arms market, and the excuses of maintaining a lifestyle, increasingly globalized ... Sacrificing daily lives in exchange for something black and sticky, cancer of our planet, as the letters that permeate the big headlines ... The hollow words, meaningless, the destruction of meanings, the falsity of marketing. The conflict between the ideals of an incongruous society that teaches us from children what we have to gradually forget later. Losing innocence, to achieve "success" and hook to the devouring machine of imposed models as a status of progress ... Impotent we contemplate. Small collaborators needed. Participating as chips in the game.

Eternal the return to my place from which I have never really gone. And I return and expose in Seville after a decade of absence. Paradox of being an emigrant in your land, a traveler without moving because it is still the city where I live, love and work. Fortunately, my work has left our borders. That has enriched me as a person and as an artist. And it has allowed me to live on it.

Babell, title of this exhibition, is a double reference, a simple game of words that fuses Babel and the number 11. A clear reference of the events that we are living in recent times. Exhibition generated from the deconstruction of poems. Normally I use my own texts, but in two of the sculptures I have used fragments of two poems by Leopoldo María Panero (Oh Bird Against Man, from the book "Danza de la Muerte") and Andrés Sánchez Robayna (Madrid Para una Elegía, from book "Correspondences").

Babell is a metaphor that can describe contemporary reality. In spite of the evolution and development of the human being, there are facts embedded in the studied skin of History that we repeat as an ironic melody. Errors already known, but that the unlimited greed of man tries to hide with invisible and effective resources. Permanent effort of the authority to counteract the inherent entropy of every empire.

Power is camouflaged as a cancer and extends into a global world. It generates an artificial and parallel reality to alienate consciences and create models or lifestyle tailored to the perfect measure of their interests.

Power is multinational and has neither a fatherland nor a flag, although it uses them as a necessary weapon to elaborate its strategy, but without really caring about the simple people who represent it.

The lie is institutionalized and leads us with a subtle sarcasm to the loss of the value of the word. It creates signifiers without meaning, to achieve an insignificant, material and insensitive reality. It becomes a simple instrument of manipulation.

The human being will be left without a voice and without the possibility of carrying out a critical analysis of his reality.

The word is the greatest weapon, the one that distinguishes us from the rest of the animals and the one that allows us to communicate, to elaborate a dialogue that brings us closer to the "other", which allows us to know and understand each other.

Concepts such as freedom, democracy, religion, love, culture, nation, etc., are often posed with such ambiguity or sarcasm that leads to permanent skepticism and a lack of ideals.

The number 11, accompanied by different consonants, has become a symbol of pain, of absences. Each one carries a story. A multiplicity that names, of faces that leave in other deep wounds. We are all part of them.

But those absences and that pain is the same, whether produced by a few fanatics or by perfectly equipped armies. That pain unites us with words expressed in many languages, with different signifiers but with the same meanings. It is the word, which spills like tears. The words that unite us.

Jesus Algovi.

Marathon (Greece), May 2007