New expanded edition featuring 75 drawings/watercolors by Sigismond de Vajay.
In 2008 and 2009, Sigismond de Vajay created a series of drawings and watercolors for an exhibition at the Zavaleta Lab Gallery in Buenos Aires—scenes suspended between catastrophe, irony and fragility, poised at the border between observation and invention.
The book that emerged from that work sold out long ago, and has kept circulating from hand to hand for over a decade.
Then these images began to resurface elsewhere: in television news, on smartphones, in the constant flow of images that now runs through daily life. Not because these drawings had predicted specific events, but because reality itself seemed to catch up with the questions they had been asking all along.
A far more compelling idea took hold: not to reproduce the same object, but to expand it in every direction. This new edition became a genuine editorial project—a chance to build a new book from the history of the first one.
A plane in flames, the silence before a building collapses, the dark splendor of a raging fire or an erupting volcano—our small everyday apocalypses, which de Vajay observes with a redeeming sarcasm rather than complacent pessimism. As Werner Herzog once said, the collapse of the universe will happen, like creation itself, in grandiose splendor.
This new edition brings together the 63 original drawings + 12 previously unseen works, created in 2026. Designed once again by Paula Galli, it preserves the "boutique feel" of the first edition while expanding into four languages—Spanish, English, French and Japanese —, with a dual reading direction and two covers, Western and Eastern, so that its very structure reflects the diversity of the readers it speaks to today. It also includes a revisited prologue and a new epilogue by Pedro Donoso.
This edition does not seek to replace the 2009 book, nor to correct it. It simply invites it to be read again from a different present.
Works of art never remain still.
They change as our way of looking at them changes.
And sometimes, they also change because the world around them has changed.
Sigismond de Vajay is a protean artist, curator and publisher, Argentinian, Hungarian and Swiss, born in Paris (1972). He worked in Vevey, Barcelona and New York, where he studied at the SVA. Since 2009 he lives in Buenos Aires. His works include installations, drawings, videos, interventions in the public space and sculptures. In 2002 he moved to Barcelona, where he set up with a collective a platform for contemporary art,
KBB (Kültur Büro Barcelona). He develops important projects for galleries, museums and institutions in Switzerland, France, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Brazil.
His work highlights the systems that govern the planet, irregularities and social differences, power and global control. With a disenchanted look, his art oscillates ceaselessly between the human and the machine, the individual and the mass, or even nature and technology. His productions have in common a dystopian aesthetic with which he describes the condition of contemporary societies in the state of ruin.
