ATLANTIS
GABRIEL VALANSI
Sept 27 - Nov 20, 2025
IN SEARCH OF ATLANTIS
For decades—centuries, even—whether inspired by noble intentions or by the most dubious motives, theosophists and occultists, mystics and pseudo-scientists, charlatans and conspiracy theorists alike have fueled popular fascination with Atlantis: a supposed ancient yet highly advanced civilization, tragically lost to the depths of the sea.
At least one element of that legend resonates powerfully today: the Atlanteans are said to have perished through the unchecked expansion of their own technology.
After a long succession of frustrated attempts—near the Bosphorus, off the Strait of Gibraltar, by the Azores, or in the Gulf of Laconia—the ruins of Atlantis’s prodigious constructions have, at last, been revealed.
They were not hidden on the seabed, nor at the ocean floor, nor beneath the waves of the Mediterranean.
Instead, the traces of this archetype of the “lost city” have surfaced within the fissures of a contemporary process of trans-codification: in the residual glitches of three-dimensional printing—caused by electronic errors or micro mechanical failures—Gabriel Valansi has unearthed Atlantis.
“The original matrix of computer science,” writes Éric Sadin, “maintains a furtive connection with the Kabbalah, which sees in texts or phenomena the possibility of being entirely transcribed — or ‘trans-codified’ — into numbers, to unravel them or reorder them according to their fundamental components.”
Undeniably, something mystical and enigmatic also haunts the cracks of this contemporary Gematria, which mathematically transposes objects to command their reproduction.
Each fault in transduction gives rise to strange, spectral forms — fragments of an impossible culture, ominous yet strikingly beautiful.
Florencio Noceti
Gabriel Valansi is a visual artist and photographer whose practice spans video, installation, and photography. He has represented Argentina in international biennials such as Ushuaia (2001) and La Habana (2003, 2012), and has received awards including Artist of the Year from the Argentine Association of Art Critics (2001) and the OSDE Foundation Award for Visual Arts (2005). His work has been exhibited across Argentina, Europe, the United States, and Latin America, and is held in major public collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, USA), the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, France), the Museum of Modern Art (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Casa de las Américas (Havana, Cuba), and key Argentine institutions including MAMBA, MACRO, and the Emilio Caraffa Museum.