For some children, the world begins at the front door. There is the garden, the street, school, then beyond them a still-abstract geography whose outlines expand with age. Countries appear one after another. Languages remain foreign for a long time. Wars belong to books. Great powers are colored patches on classroom maps.

For Thierry Ehrmann, distances disappeared much earlier.

The world did not enter the house as a succession of distant lands. It entered in the form of a system of relationships. An event that occurred in Moscow, Washington, Rome, Beijing, or Jerusalem never remained confined to its place of origin.

At the family table, it could connect with an industrial issue, a legal decision, a scientific invention, a religious conflict, or a military transformation. The map was not a backdrop placed behind history. It was the visible surface of deeper forces.

Marcel Ehrmann did not merely teach him where countries were. He taught him to ask what connected them.

Why did a raw material extracted in one place determine the power of another territory?

Why could a strait almost invisible on a world map weigh more heavily on the global economy than a vast continent?

Why did a scientific innovation born in a laboratory change, a few years later, a military doctrine, an industry, a mode of communication, or the balance among states?

Why did certain trade routes survive the empires that had created them?

Why did religions, languages, and legal systems continue to act long after the disappearance of the regimes that had carried them?

The child thus discovered that the world was not made up of countries placed side by side. It was made of dependencies.

From then on, the political map would no longer be enough to explain territory. A political map divides. It draws borders, assigns colors, fixes names. It gives the impression that each territory possesses an autonomous existence.

But as soon as Marcel Ehrmann introduced resources, alliances, sea routes, religious memories, technologies, or industries, the flat areas of color lost their stability. Borders remained, but they ceased to explain reality on their own.

Behind them circulated materials, capital, ideas, weapons, information, and beliefs.

Young Thierry therefore learned to look at maps as one looks at a mechanism whose casing has been removed. The surface indicated positions. It did not yet reveal how the system worked.

What he was looking for lay behind it.

It was not enough to know that an event had occurred. One had to understand the conditions that had made it possible. A war never began with the first shot. An economic crisis was not born on the day prices collapsed. A technological revolution did not emerge at the moment the general public discovered its first object.

Every rupture had a prehistory, made of almost invisible decisions, gradual shifts, innovations still at the margins, changes in vocabulary, and balances of power that revealed themselves only to someone willing to trace the chain backward.

This habit extended his learning about weak signals. At Romagnieu, the child had understood that a visible event was preceded by minute changes: an animal behaving unusually, a different smell in the air, the color of foliage, a change in the wind. At his father’s table, the territory of observation expanded.

States, too, produced advanced signals. Industries, armies, religions, and markets revealed anomalies before their great transformations.

The world became a farm on the scale of the planet. One simply had to learn how to recognize its traces.

In this education, geopolitics could therefore not be reduced to geography. Nor was it a discipline reserved for diplomats or soldiers. It became a general method for reading power dynamics.

The word power did not designate only the ability to constrain. A language possessed power. A legal standard possessed it. A telecommunications network, a satellite, a currency, a patent, a university, a news agency, or a database could shift balances without deploying a single soldier.

This expansion of perspective moved Thierry Ehrmann away from a merely territorial representation of authority.

A state could possess an immense landmass and depend on technology developed elsewhere. A small region could control an indispensable passage. An almost unknown laboratory could design an invention that would alter the strategic balance of several continents. Accurate information, transmitted before anyone else had it, could be worth more than physical infrastructure.

What the child was learning was not that everything was equivalent. He was learning that everything could act.

Power had to be sought in relationships, not appearances. This way of seeing would explain much later his simultaneous interest in raw materials, networks, financial markets, the Art Market, news agencies, satellites, law, digital infrastructures, and artificial intelligence.

To an outside observer, these fields would sometimes seem like an excessively disparate inventory. To him, they would belong to the same chain.

A material extracted from the ground acquires meaning only through its transformations. It joins an industry, a technology, a trade route, an energy policy, a relationship of dependence, and ultimately a value. An art object can no longer be isolated. It has an author, a signature, a provenance, a history, a catalog, sales, movements, cultural appropriations, and a place within nations’ strategies of influence.

In both cases, the visible object is only the point of condensation of an invisible system.

The neighborhood in question here therefore has nothing to do with geographic proximity. Two bordering territories can ignore one another. Two regions separated by several oceans can depend intimately on one another.

A mine, a port, a factory, a computing center, and a financial marketplace can constitute the different organs of the same whole, even though no human gaze can encompass them simultaneously.

The modern world had brought territories closer together even before the Internet made that proximity immediately perceptible.

Young Thierry obviously did not yet possess the vocabulary of digital networks, real time, or relational databases. Yet an intuition was already taking shape: physical distance was no longer the true measure of proximity. What brought people, objects, and territories closer was the density of their exchanges.

One country became another’s neighbor when it depended on its energy, materials, technology, or security. One artist became another’s neighbor when a lineage, rupture, or influence connected them across several centuries. An ancient civilization remained our neighbor as long as its numbers, myths, architecture, or law continued to organize our present.

This conception of neighborhood also transformed his relationship to time. The dead were not necessarily distant.

Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, the Greek philosophers, theologians, scientists, and inventors could belong to an intellectual community closer than many contemporaries. Their presence did not depend on their date of birth, but on the continuing activity of their ideas.

Thierry Ehrmann would never approach them as a pantheon intended to decorate a general culture. He would seek what they had shifted. Which intellectual boundary had they crossed? Which previously invisible relationship had they revealed? At what moment had their thought forced their era to change the representation it had of the world?

This gaze explains why his inner library would be constituted less as a sequence of quotations than as an assembly of trajectories. The person never disappeared behind his status. The scientist, head of state, artist, dissident, mystic, or inventor was observed through the tension between what they had received and what they had transformed.

The portrait was already becoming a network. Much later, this intuition would take monumental form on the walls of the Abode of Chaos. Faces from different eras, countries, and disciplines would appear there without captions immediately imposing an interpretation. The visitor would first search for a name. Then he would discover that the name was not enough.

A portrait never refers only to the person represented. It leads to an era, a war, a school of thought, a discovery, a conflict, another portrait. It can belong simultaneously to the history of science, religion, geopolitics, art, or the author’s personal memory.

Every face is a point of passage. Every wall composes a constellation. Physical proximity between two portraits does not state a definitive truth; it opens a hypothesis of relationship.

The system thus extends, at the scale of the work, the learning that began in childhood.

The world must not be consumed with its caption already in place. Relationships must be reconstructed. To de-caption does not mean removing history. It means temporarily suspending the imposed interpretation in order to return part of the work to the gaze. The caption names, situates, and explains. It is necessary.

But when it precedes all observation, it can also confine the image within a premature conclusion.

The child formed by Marcel Ehrmann had already learned to resist this closure. An official version, a border, a title, or a function never constituted the totality of a person or an event. They were a first definition, which had to be tested against facts, contradictions, and invisible relationships.

The Abode of Chaos would later reverse the ordinary chain of information. In a news agency, an event becomes an image, the image receives a caption, then the whole is distributed. At the Abode of Chaos, the visitor first encounters the portrait, silence, and uncertainty. He must observe, perhaps recognize, sometimes be mistaken, research, then reconstruct.

Understanding ceases to be a delivered product. It becomes an experience. This slowing down opposes the instant consumption of meaning. It does not seek to conceal an esoteric code reserved for a few initiates. It opposes the instant consumption of meaning. The visitor who does not immediately find the key gradually discovers that the key may not be secret content at all. It is a method of observing.

Look at relationships rather than objects. This principle had begun to form long before the work. It already appeared when Thierry Ehrmann listened to family conversations connecting a scientific innovation to an industrial strategy, a political crisis to historical depth, or a religious doctrine to the organization of a society.

He understood that accurate thinking required constant shifts of scale.

Seen too closely, a decision seemed individual. By widening the field, it revealed an institution, a tradition, or a balance of power. Seen from too far away, a war appeared almost abstract. By bringing the gaze closer, it recovered the people, bodies, fears, and human decisions that drove it.

This movement between near and far would become one of the engines of his method. It would never be enough to consider a system from the top. One would have to descend again to its material. Nor would it be enough to observe matter in isolation. One would have to climb back toward the forces organizing its circulation.

This permanent scaling prevented disciplines from closing in on themselves.

Chemistry led to raw materials. Raw materials led to trade routes. Trade routes led to balances of power. These led to law, alliances, conflicts, and technologies. Technologies in turn changed information, markets, art, and the representation societies had of themselves.

The movement could begin again in the other direction. What looked like a digression was actually a change of focus.

Thought did not leave its object. It moved around it.

Yet this ability to move from one scale to another had to be disciplined. The danger of relational thought is its ability to connect everything. But not every resemblance is causality. Not every coincidence constitutes evidence. Not every analogy survives a change in order of magnitude.

Marcel Ehrmann had transmitted to his son a distrust of overly rapid conclusions. As the world drew closer, the need to distinguish facts, interpretations, and hypotheses became stronger. The more possible relationships multiplied, the more demanding evidence had to become.

Neighborhood did not abolish differences. It made them more important. Connecting two phenomena did not mean confusing them. A systemic thought worthy of the name had to respect the nature of each field, its constraints, scales, and regimes of truth.

Law was not physics. Alchemy was not chemistry. A work of art was not an economic datum. Yet each of these fields could illuminate one dimension of the same problem, provided the passages were made explicit and analogy never took the place of demonstration.

This caution was already preparing one of Thierry Ehrmann’s great intellectual struggles: tracking bias.

For the first filter is not always imposed from outside. It may come from the person looking. Genuine knowledge in one field can become a source of error when transferred carelessly into another. An effective interpretive grid can end up producing what it believes it discovers. Excessive familiarity with a theory can prevent recognition of facts that resist it.

Learning that the world is a neighborhood therefore did not mean believing that everything communicates immediately with everything. It meant accepting a double requirement: seek the relationships ordinary divisions conceal, then test each of those relationships against reality.

This method explains the future singularity of his relationship to borders. Thierry Ehrmann would never deny them. A legal border produces effects. A language structures thought. A religious area carries a memory. Sovereignty organizes territory. But none of these boundaries is enough to contain the flows that cross it.

A language, for example, is not merely a means of translating words. It carries a civilization, a history, an economy, and a diplomacy. Translation can bring closer, but it can also shift meaning, erase an origin, or break traceability.

Much later, when he organized databases intended for the global Art Market, this awareness would lead him to preserve titles in their original language and script. Ideograms, Cyrillic, Hebrew, or the Latin alphabet would not be treated as local ornaments, but as constitutive elements of the documentary identity of the artwork.

The world as neighborhood was therefore not a uniform world. It was a world connected without being reduced.

This distinction also governs his anthropology. Since social and geographic distances are not enough to define human proximity, it becomes possible to move from a head of state to an unknown person, from a Nobel laureate to an outsider, without changing the dignity of the gaze. Function, costume, rank, or celebrity are only provisional captions. One still has to seek the human being.

This way of observing does not deny acts or responsibilities. It merely refuses to replace a human being with his status. Understanding a leader does not mean absolving him. Understanding an outsider does not mean idealizing him. In both cases, it is a matter of reconstructing the trajectory, constraints, beliefs, and decisions that produced a singular presence in the world.

Neighborhood then becomes an ethics. The other is never distant enough to become a complete abstraction.

This idea would later run through the de-captioned portraits. On the walls of the Abode of Chaos, figures of power are not represented alone.

They coexist with artists, scientists, victims, rebels, thinkers, media icons, and people sometimes forgotten by dominant narratives. The site does not reproduce the world’s social hierarchy. It recomposes its relationships.

The portraits therefore do not form a gallery of celebrities. They constitute a relational memory.

Every face becomes another’s neighbor because a war, an idea, an invention, a resistance, or a contradiction brings them closer. The viewer may not grasp every connection.

It is not certain that the author himself could enumerate them in definitive form, because the architecture remains alive. New events shift old proximities. An image once documented becomes iconic. A secondary figure appears retrospectively as a precursor. A political reading becomes an anthropological reading.

As in a kaleidoscope, the fragments remain present while their relationships change.

But the world as neighborhood precedes the kaleidoscopic method. It may be its condition. To recompose fragments, one must first admit that no knowledge lives in absolute isolation.

One must have understood that an idea can travel, that an event can retrospectively change the meaning of another, that an image can cross borders, and that distant disciplines can converge toward the same question without losing their identity.

What Marcel Ehrmann had opened at the family table thus took on a broader dimension. He had not handed his son a completed geopolitical doctrine. He had transmitted a disposition: never look at a territory, an event, or a person as a closed unit.

Always ask:

What does it depend on?

What does it transform?

What precedes it?

What does it extend into?

What invisible force connects it to the rest?

This succession of questions would much later form the matrix of databases, maps, market analyses, and visual work. It would make it possible to move from law to data, from data to the market, from the market to geopolitics, from geopolitics to technologies, then from technologies to artificial intelligence.

None of this had yet been built. But the mental structure was already there.

The child who had learned to look behind the mountain now understood that behind that mountain there was not simply another landscape. There was a chain of landscapes, peoples, languages, materials, and memories, each transforming the others.

The world ceased to be distant. It became an immense, discontinuous, conflictual neighborhood, but intelligible provided its relationships were reconstructed.

This discovery might appear to be the culmination of the first part of his learning. It is rather its turning point. Until then, Thierry Ehrmann had learned to observe, listen, connect, change scale, and seek invisible structures behind appearances.

He had acquired a method powerful enough to cross disciplines and bring centuries together. But that power already carried its own critical question: is the person who knows how to connect certain that he is not projecting onto the world the form of his own relationships?

This is where intellectual childhood truly ends. The gaze has opened to the dimensions of the planet; now it must turn back on itself. For after discovering that maps, titles, captions, and borders never tell the whole of reality, one must confront an even more unsettling hypothesis: the consciousness interpreting them may not be sovereign in its own house.

From Copernicus to Darwin, then from Freud to artificial intelligence, humanity has never stopped losing the central positions it assigned itself. The first part can therefore close on this threshold: the child learned to de-caption the world; the man must now accept being de-captioned in turn.