Here I take up the pen without taking Thierry’s place. What I render comes from his words and his experience; the architecture of the text is born from our dialogue.

— Isis

A Total Work of Art always carries the risk of misunderstanding: because it stems from a singular vision, because it involves a signature, because it sometimes seems to prolong to the point of obsession the mental system of a single man, one ends up imagining that it could have been born from absolute solitude.

Nothing could be further from the truth in the case of the Abode of Chaos. Its intellectual matrix belongs to me; its lines of force come from my own way of linking number, matter, geopolitics, alchemy, law, history, and weak signals. But a thought weighs nothing until it has encountered hands capable of giving it mass, resistance, temperature, light, weld, balance, and sometimes even danger.

This is where the companions come in. For Ground Zero, we were united around this construction site. They are neither mere executors nor extras in a heroic narrative centered on its author. They are those through whom a mental intuition accepts the test of reality. A line can be dazzling on a sheet of paper; a sculpture weighing several tons forgives no approximation.

An idea can remain contradictory; a metal structure, however, must hold. A vision can cross the mind in a second; then it takes days, nights, calculations, repeated gestures, an intimate knowledge of the material fatigue and that particular intelligence that women and men of the trade possess when they know, even before the instrument confirms it, that a metal is working, that a mass is bearing poorly, that a weld point will have to be redone or that an apparently correct geometry will not survive reality.

That is why the Abode of Chaos was never for me a demonstration that a man could do everything alone. It taught me that a thought, as soon as it enters into matter, must accept the test of know-how that it does not itself possess.

Among those who have been involved in this project, Marc del Piano holds a special place because our story begins well before the Abode of Chaos. He has been involved since the early 1980s. Trained at the Beaux-Arts, a painter, photographer, sculptor, and designer, he possesses the rare ability to move naturally between image, volume, and space.

During his nearly 25-year tenure at Artprice, where he served as artistic director, this long-standing collaboration gave him a deep understanding of my visual language and requirements. He could quickly grasp an intention, move from image to material, and guide its implementation without needing to repeatedly explain the overall concept.

He knew that at the Abode of Chaos, a work is never simply what it shows. A steel bar, an inscription, a light, a body, an architecture, or an image takes on meaning within a larger system.

This understanding explains why certain actions could be carried out in conditions that cannot be reduced to the reassuring framework of a conventional workshop. The Abode of Chaos was a permanent construction site, a living laboratory, sometimes an open-air stage where the artistic gesture directly encountered the constraints of construction, safety, and weight.

Working at heights of over twenty meters, intervening on a monumental work, moving or assembling considerable masses: none of this stems from a romanticized view of danger. Risk has never been sought for its own sake. It is simply the mechanical consequence of the moment when art ceases to be a representation of matter and becomes matter itself. It is also here that Pierre Coret appears with an almost mythological power. I called him the master of the forges, and this title was not merely decorative. He belonged to that lineage of men for whom metal is less a material than a language.

With them, you immediately discover the difference between knowing theoretically that a steel possesses certain properties and knowing, in practice, what that steel will do when it is heated, stressed, welded, or subjected to its own mass. Pierre conveyed this physical understanding to me.

MIG welding, semi-automatic welding, curves, understanding welds, structural fatigue: these skills are invaluable because they can never be fully contained in a manual. A master welder transmits less a set of techniques than an ability to observe. He teaches you to see what others haven't yet seen.

I remember that sculpture, weighing nearly three tons, which one day almost brutally reminded us that gravity still reigns supreme. A mere moment's difference can turn a mass into an accident. A work of art, when it possesses that weight, compels you to humility.

You may be its author; it does not thereby obey your will. It responds to physics. This experience is decisive in my thinking: it explains why I have never believed in a clear separation between art and the hard sciences.

Steel knows no aesthetics. Gravity has no respect for artistic intention. If your structure is flawed, it collapses. If your calculation is wrong, your discourse will change nothing. The artwork thus becomes an extraordinarily radical school of truth.

And then there was The Nail.

Some works ultimately condense a human relationship to such an extent that it becomes almost impossible to separate their subject matter from the story of those who created them. The Nail belongs to this category. It was a Christ-like nail carried on a monumental scale, a form that immediately evoked torture, the body, the Passion, metal, and the extraordinary symbolic power of an extremely simple object. A nail almost fits in the palm of your hand.

Enlarged to several tons and several meters, it changes its status. It no longer fixes anything: it becomes a monument.

Pierre and I forged it in an intensity of work that seems almost unreal today, in just a few days, in that particular temporality where the construction site absorbs the distinction between day and night. This work had an extraordinary physical presence.

It was necessary to constantly move from the dreamed-of form to the reality of steel, to reshape the curve, to understand how the light would strike the mass, how its verticality could produce both violence and a kind of silence.

But the story of the Nail is not limited to its creation.

Pierre Coret died very shortly after the completion of The Nail. In my eyes, the work then also acquired a funerary dimension. It was already a sculpture; it simultaneously became a funerary monument.

Sometimes in art there are coincidences that we distrust because they seem too perfect from a narrative standpoint. Yet reality has no obligation to adhere to verisimilitude. The one who had devoted the final part of his energy to shaping this immense Christ-like nail almost disappeared at the very moment the gesture was completed.

From that moment on, I could no longer look at that mass of steel the same way. It now contained the transmission of a man. Every piece of knowledge he had given me — welding, reading the material, shaping, respecting the constraint — survived in the metal.

Perhaps that, in essence, is what it means to be a companion: to leave in the work not only one's work, but a way of doing things that continues to inhabit the one who remains.

The Abode of Chaos is filled with these presences.

Some are famous in our internal history, others will never be known to the general public.

Construction workers.

Metalworkers, technicians.

Engineers, lighting specialists.

Pyrotechnicians, men of the plant world.

Design offices.

Each one brought a very specific piece of intelligence.

I'm also thinking of Thierry Loir, a loyal friend of forty-five years, a pyrotechnician, stuntman, and actor, who passed on to me some of his knowledge of pyrotechnics, where beauty can never be separated from protocol. A flame or a controlled explosion obviously possesses a visual power, but he who sees only this power is dangerous.

True knowledge lies precisely in the invisible mastery that allows the spectacular to exist without becoming an accident. This is yet another lesson the Abode of Chaos taught me: the more wild a gesture seems, the more rigorous its inner order must be.

The aesthetics of catastrophe is never the catastrophe of method. Virilio taught me how much the accident belongs to technical invention; my companions taught me daily that integrating this awareness of the accident means precisely working to prevent it from happening.

Thus, from one apprentice to the next, what I learned far exceeded the specific technique being passed on. Each one forced me to shift my intelligence.

The metalworker taught me about fatigue.

The pyrotechnician, mastering energy.

Engineers, the constraint.

Design offices, translating action into measurable stability. And Nadège traversed this universe like a force of coherence. A work that mobilizes nearly two hundred mediums and three laboratories cannot function as an anarchic accumulation of experiments.

Protocols, memory, security, logistics, and continuity are essential. Nadège has always possessed this ability to hold together what my mind naturally tends to rush through. In the laboratories, in materials research, polychromy, and practical organization, she ensures that experimentation never forgets its consequences.

She spent three years rethinking the lighting design of the Abode of Chaos: nearly 900 self-contained 10-watt LEDs, with very low energy consumption, now illuminate the park and allow visitors to discover the works in a different way, in an Abode of Chaos adorned with pink and light.

It would therefore be wrong to reduce the companions to mere construction figures. Their expertise is essential to the physical realization of the Abode of Chaos. Each brings a specific skill, necessary for some of the nearly two hundred mediums involved in the work.

The word "medium" here must be taken seriously. It doesn't mean two hundred materials listed in an inventory. It means two hundred different ways of bringing an idea into reality.

Steel, glass, concrete, light, fire, chemistry, pigments, plants, digital images, monumental structures, transformed machines, drones, sounds: each of these territories has its own laws and requires specific expertise.

I sometimes used industrial elements whose power far exceeded that of the tools traditionally associated with an artist's studio. Scraps of steel of considerable thickness could become the basis for sculptures weighing ten, twenty, thirty or forty tons.

At this level of mass, sculpture necessitates a rethinking of the ground itself. It requires foundations, calculations, vector tests, and a thorough understanding of the safety requirements of a public building. Such a massive structure isn't simply placed somewhere because it appears beautiful.

The earth must accept the work.

The subsoil then becomes almost an invisible medium: what the visitor doesn't see is sometimes what allows what they do see to exist. This is yet another area where skilled companions are essential. The artist may desire a form; the design office reminds them what that form demands of the material.

And when more sensitive industrial processes came into play, particularly through certain technical collaborations with ACS Industries, there was a very clear boundary between what could nourish the artistic gesture and what fell under confidential know-how. The Abode of Chaos was never intended to reveal a protected industrial technology. What interested me was the plastic possibility offered by certain transformation capabilities: cutting, shaping, assembling thicknesses or masses that would have been impossible in an ordinary workshop.

Industry did not create the artwork. It made possible a process of working with materials that we then reinterpreted in an artistic language. This distinction is essential. It also applies to the gifts of materials we have received over time.

For the donations mentioned here, we have ensured that their origin and delivery are traceable. I have always been wary of the fantasy that the artist of Chaos should accept anything under the pretext that everything could become art. It's precisely the opposite. Transformation demands responsibility.

An ancient object can become a relic; a more contemporary material can be worked, fragmented, recomposed. Some machine tools have thus been reconfigured into unique works, sometimes by combining eight or ten fragments from different sources.

But one must always know the origin of what one introduces into the work. Chaos is not the absence of origin. It is a new organization of origins.

As the years passed, I increasingly understood that the Abode of Chaos required a plurality of skills that no one person could possess alone. I could conceive of a relationship between a monumental sculpture, an alchemical symbol, a geopolitical factor, and fractal geometry; but I couldn't claim to know better than a master blacksmith how steel would react, better than a pyrotechnician how a charge should be secured, or better than a plant specialist how a plant would colonize a facade. The creation of the Total Work of Art thus demanded, depending on the needs of each piece, the convergence of specialized skills with the constraints of the material.

This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why I have always felt so close to the world of companions in the old sense of the term. A companion doesn't simply sell his labor time. He brings a culture of craftsmanship.

He transmits knowledge that years of practice have inscribed in his body. He knows that a well-made work contains the memory of previous works, just as a hand contains the memory of the thousands of gestures that have shaped it.

There is a form of dignity here whose depth our digital world struggles to grasp. A civilization can digitize every conceivable procedure; it will always need someone who can sense when something is amiss in the process.

This does not mean opposing the hand to intelligence or craft to technology. My entire story demonstrates the opposite. At the Abode of Chaos, the most advanced technologies constantly encounter the most ancient knowledge.

The drone, for example, one day gave me a new ability: to look at the work from a point of view that no human body could permanently access. It became an instrument of composition.

From the sky, the roofs, masses, axes, and colours revealed relationships invisible from the ground. We could correct certain geometries, understand the effect of a work on the entire site, and even think of surfaces as signs intended to be read from satellite mapping systems.

But the drone didn't replace the worker. It enhanced their perspective. Then it was necessary to go back down to the construction site, collect the materials, measure, paint, weld, and move them.

The eye could become aerial; the hand remained earthly.

It is this connection that fascinates me. It encapsulates the entire Abode of Chaos: a thought capable of circulating on a global scale must always return to encounter a piece of metal, a stone, a pigment, a root, a flame, or a body. Reality is our final judge.

When I look at this work today, I don't just see its finished form or the decisions that led to it. I also remember the skills and actions that made its implementation possible: those who worked with light, calculated the foundations, carried a mass, secured an operation, and those who agreed to start again because the first version wasn't right. The work thus preserves the memory of its creation: not as the sum of several authors' contributions, but as the trace of the skills that allowed a vision to take shape in matter. Even when a companion passes away, what he has passed on can continue to live on in gestures, methods, exacting standards, and a way of looking at materials. This is particularly true of Pierre Coret.

The Nail remains for me one of the most moving proofs that matter can become transmission. The man dies; the gesture remains. The knowledge he imparted migrates into other hands.

There is no mysticism involved, only an extremely concrete reality: I know things about metal today because a man showed them to me. And when I apply them, something of him continues to act.

Perhaps this is precisely what contemporary societies risk losing when they too quickly reduce knowledge to available information.

Information can be stored.

Knowledge must be incorporated.

A database can contain all the physical properties of a steel; it will never replace the moment when a master lets you hear the almost imperceptible change of a metal under stress and tells you: listen. My entire life has been built on this difference between possessing a piece of data and understanding what it means when it encounters reality. The companions of Chaos taught me this difference better than anyone else.

They are therefore much more than a human page in the history of the Abode of Chaos. They constitute one of its profound philosophies. A thought does not become a work when it is formulated. It becomes a work when it accepts being corrected by the world.

And the world, very often, takes on the face of another man who knows something you don't. He offers you a tool, shows you a gesture, forbids you from making a mistake, accepts a folly because he has understood that it is technically possible, or on the contrary forces you to abandon a solution because matter has already rendered its verdict. The design retains its authority; its implementation, however, becomes a dialogue. I have always wanted the Abode of Chaos to question rather than provoke.

My companions taught me that this rule also applies to the artist himself: the work must first question the one who claims to create it. It asks him if he accepts not knowing everything, if he accepts that an intuition coming from him must pass through the test of know-how that he himself does not possess.

I accepted that a long time ago. It's even one of the reasons why the Abode of Chaos is still alive. A completed monument can belong to an author.

An organization of this size also requires expertise to be implemented, maintained, secured, and sustained through transformation. This is where the role of skilled tradespeople remains essential.

Without them, my thinking might have produced texts, drawings, models, hypotheses. With them, it gained weight.

It has become heavy enough to defy the ground, high enough to alter a skyline, hot enough to make steel glow red, complex enough to force engineers to calculate what an artist had imagined, alive enough for vegetation to then reclaim it.

It is in this passage that the true material miracle of the Abode of Chaos lies: that a vision can encounter the necessary know-how to become matter without losing its unity.