I believe we often make the same mistake when we look at a work of art: we look for the moment when it was finished. We want to be able to say that on such and such a date the artist made their last gesture, that the form ceased to evolve, that the object is now stabilized and that the time of its preservation then begins.

This chronology is perfectly suited to many works. It is much less suitable for the Abode of Chaos because it is not a finished object but an organism in transformation.

This formulation seems right to me because it immediately shifts the question. It's no longer about when I'll finish The Abode of Chaos. It's about understanding precisely why it cannot end without ceasing to be itself.

This idea didn't come about after the fact, as a convenient justification for continuing the project. It was already present in the initial design. When I began transforming the Domaine de la Source, I never imagined for a moment that we could simply tie a ribbon, inaugurate the entire project, and announce: the work is now complete. The Abode of Chaos was conceived as a body. And a living body doesn't stop evolving just because it has reached an identifiable form.

It grows.

It heals.

It ages.

It absorbs.

It rejects.

It transforms.

It only retains its identity by constantly changing. This apparent contradiction lies at the heart of every organism: remaining oneself while becoming something else. And that's exactly what I wanted for the Abode of Chaos.

It was therefore necessary to accept that matter would continue what I had begun. In the previous chapter, I spoke of steel, acid, rust, concrete, weight, and corrosion as physical archives. But these archives are not inert. They continue to write.

A metal surface is working.

A painting is affected by light.

The concrete absorbs moisture.

A crack forms, stabilizes, or necessitates intervention. A plant grows where it didn't exist before. A root slightly lifts the soil. A branch conceals a mark for a season, then reveals it differently after pruning. Rain leaves a trace I hadn't drawn. Frost creates tension. The sun transforms a pigment. There isn't the artwork on one side and, around it, an environment that accidentally alters it. The environment has become part of the artwork.

This is where the notion of forming form becomes essential. I have never liked the idea of a form simply imposed upon reality, as if the artist conceived in an abstract space and then transported their object to a place that remained external to their thought. A forming form acts differently: it possesses a generative capacity. It produces other relationships, other forms, other perceptions. It is not merely what we see; it is what continues to appear.

At the Abode of Chaos, one intervention can alter the interpretation of another intervention located several dozen meters away. A sculpture placed somewhere transforms a perspective. A mural suddenly changes the meaning of a pre-existing mass of steel. A tree, through its growth, becomes an architectural element. A shadow, at certain times of day, creates a composition that doesn't exist in the morning. What is created is therefore never simply an addition of objects. It is a transformation of the entire space.

This logic explains why fractals have become so important to me. I am not talking about fractals as a decorative motif or as a learned way of dressing up the work with scientific vocabulary.

What interests me is their logic: a structure that repeats itself while changing scale, an order that remains recognizable through transformations, a form that contains in each of its parts something of the whole without ever reproducing it identically. I recognize in it a mental logic that can be described as fractal: certain structures and relationships reappear at different scales, without reproducing themselves identically.

You can look at it from a drone and perceive an overall composition, descend to the level of a building, approach a wall, and then look only at a scar, an inscription, a weld, a line of rust. At each scale, something of the overall grammar reappears.

It's never exactly the same shape. That's precisely what matters.

In a typical repetitive system, we copy. In a fractal structure, we generate variations governed by rules. The difference is fundamental. It directly relates to the 99 words I mentioned earlier. They weren't a catalog of instructions to be mechanically reproduced. They constituted a generative vocabulary.

Similarly, the forms in the Abode of Chaos are not repeated units like industrial components. They respond to one another, transform, and proliferate. A crack can evoke another crack without copying it. A metallic structure can resonate with a tree. A grid, a computer network, a geopolitical map, and a root can suddenly belong to the same visual family because they all speak of connection, branching, and propagation.

That's where the landscape ceases to be a backdrop.

A traditional landscape is often conceived as something surrounding architecture. Here, I wanted it to be an active participant. The tree isn't placed there simply to provide shade or beauty. It possesses a temporality that I cannot entirely control. It grows at a speed that is not that of concrete. It changes with the seasons. It can die. It can be struck by disease. It reacts to heat, drought, and rain. It therefore imposes a different measure of time on the artwork.

I have always been fascinated by this confrontation between multiple temporalities within the same space. Steel seems durable but oxidizes. Digital technology appears immaterial but becomes obsolete at an extraordinary speed. A tree seems fragile but can outlive several human generations. A photograph freezes a moment, while the photographed place continues to change. An archive preserves a previous state but itself ages. When all these temporalities coexist in a single work, the idea of completion becomes almost absurd. Which moment should be chosen as the definitive state?

The one from 1999?

The one from Ground Zero?

That of the first major topographic survey?

The one from the digital twin?

That of institutional recognition?

None.

Each of these moments is a state of the work, and none is the entire work.

This difference is crucial to understanding what it means to document the Abode of Chaos. Photography is never merely a reproduction. It is a snapshot in time. It says: this is what the organism was like at that moment.

A topographical survey tells a different story: this is how its masses and spatial relationships could be measured at that time. A film adds movement.

A drone reveals a geography impossible to perceive from the ground. The digital twin will go even further by freezing, with extremely high precision, a three-dimensional state of the site. But even the most precise digital model never becomes the artwork itself. It becomes its imprint at a given moment.

This idea seems essential to me because it avoids a technological pitfall. Digitizing the Abode of Chaos does not mean capturing it permanently. That would be impossible. Digitization constitutes a scientific record of its successive states. It allows us to compare, measure, understand, and transmit. But it does not replace the experience of an organism subjected to wind, sun, smells, noise, temperatures, the bodies of visitors, and the passage of time. A database can store a variation. It does not produce the chill of steel under your hand in winter.

This is why a living work of art should absolutely not be confused with an uncontrolled one. Here again, the apparent Chaos can lead to misunderstanding. To say that the Abode of Chaos is evolving does not mean that it is left to its own devices.

A park left completely neglected is eventually reclaimed by biological processes that can destroy certain structures. A building left unattended deteriorates. A monumental artwork in a public building must be inspected. Interventions may become necessary. Life, therefore, does not eliminate the need for oversight. On the contrary, it demands a form of constant vigilance.

This is where the cosa mentale comes back, but in a different form.

When creating a piece, I master its conceptual act. When that piece enters the realm of time, I obviously don't claim to control every molecule, every rain, or every branch. My role then becomes that of a guardian of its trajectory.

I must decide which transformations belong to the work and which risk destroying it. Oxidation can be beneficial. Dangerous structural corrosion is not. Vegetation can enrich a visual relationship. A root threatening a foundation demands a decision. Aging can produce a magnificent patina. A loss of legibility may necessitate reworking.

Therefore, a constant balancing act must be performed between letting things be and intervening.

This tension is far more complex than the restoration of a traditional object. When restoring an old painting, one can often define a reference state, study the original material, attempt to stabilize, clean, consolidate, and recreate without inventing. For a work whose transformation is precisely its principle, the question is more difficult:

What does it mean to return to the origin when the origin itself dictated never to remain the same?

This is one of the reasons why the scientific and heritage study conducted around the Abode of Chaos interested me so much. It forced us to move beyond ordinary categories. We couldn't simply measure facades and draw up a list of objects. We had to map gestures, relationships, repetitions, to understand that an extremely rigorous order exists behind what may appear chaotic at first glance.

This scientific reading then connected with something I had been experiencing from the beginning: the work does not reside only in its elements but in the way these elements continually generate a system.

The organism model then ceases to be for me a simple metaphor: it becomes an operational model for thinking about exchanges, transformations and the memory of the place.

An organism has a boundary, but this boundary is porous. It exchanges with its environment. It receives energy. It produces waste. It repairs itself. It retains some traces and eliminates others. It possesses a memory. It can suffer trauma. It continues to live because it transforms what happens to it.

This is how the Abode of Chaos works.

It absorbs the history of the world.

A war breaks out: signs appear.

A face suddenly enters the news: it can become a portrait.

A catastrophe shifts our collective perception: the place retains a trace of it.

A technology changes the way we see things: it ends up modifying our instruments of representation.

The outside world is therefore never completely external. It continually nourishes the organism.

This is what profoundly distinguishes the Abode of Chaos from a memorial closed off from a past event. It can contain the memory of Ground Zero without becoming a 9/11 memorial. It can speak of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Hormuz, artificial intelligence, economic crises, figures of power, or whistleblowers without becoming an illustrated encyclopedia of current events. These events enter into a pre-existing syntax and, in turn, transform it.

The Total Work of Art therefore does not only comment on history.

It metabolizes history.

This difference seems important to me. A commentary can become outdated when the event changes. A process of assimilation leaves a trace that continues to have an effect even when the initial event has become historical. A work linked to a specific crisis can, twenty years later, speak of something else entirely because the context has shifted. It acquires meanings that I hadn't necessarily foreseen, but which remain compatible with its initial structure.

This is where the forming form produces one of its most disturbing consequences: a work can begin to generate meaning beyond the conscious intention that created it.

I must be very precise here, especially after what I said in the previous chapter about the absolute mastery of the cosa mentale. This does not mean that another author miraculously inserts themselves into the work. It means that any sufficiently dense form maintains relationships with time that its author cannot fully foresee. When I bring together certain signs, certain materials, certain references, and certain structures, I govern their constitution. But I do not entirely govern the future history that will come to interpret them.

A simple example: a political portrait created in a particular context can acquire a radically different meaning ten years later if the person depicted becomes head of state, falls from grace, dies, becomes a symbol of a revolution, or finds themselves at the heart of a historical catastrophe. The work itself is materially the same. Its semantic field has shifted.

That is why the Abode of Chaos is also a seismograph.

It does not necessarily predict the event. It builds structures sensitive enough for the future event to produce a resonance within them.

This sensitivity is precisely what I've sought all my life in subtle signals. The child from Romagnieu already observed the world, wondering what, behind an innocuous appearance, foreshadowed something else. The network entrepreneur sought invisible connections before they became dominant infrastructures. Artprice built a sufficiently dense memory to bring forth trends in the Art Market. The Abode of Chaos transposes this same obsession into the physical realm.

Therefore, I don't see three separate stories.

I see the same mental architecture running through multiple media.

This is probably also why fractals resonate with me so much. They allow us to observe a general logic at different scales. What I do on a wall is similar to what I do in a database; what I do in a sculpture sometimes resembles what I do in network architecture; what I do in a portrait can reproduce the same intellectual operation by which Artprice links a provenance to a previous sale. They are obviously not the same objects, but the cognitive structure remains recognizable: identifying traces, connecting them, making them visible, revealing a geometry behind their dispersion.

The Abode of Chaos is precisely this geometry that has become territory.

And a territory never ends.

Even when we stop building it, it continues to be traversed.

Visitors also participate in this transformation as producers of perception and memory. They walk, photograph, film, and tell stories. They sometimes return twenty years later and discover that the place they thought they knew has changed. In the meantime, they too have changed. A living work of art possesses this strange property of being able to age with its viewers.

I find this experience particularly important for the generations who have known the Abode of Chaos since childhood. A child who came with their parents can return as an adult. Some rooms are still there. Others have changed. New works have appeared. Trees have grown.

The political world he had seen painted on the walls is no longer the same. Some figures have become historical. The visit then becomes simultaneously an interpretation of the artwork and a reading of one's own history.

This is characteristic of places truly inhabited by time.

A photograph we keep at home sometimes works in this way: it doesn't change, but we change around it. The Abode of Chaos possesses this dimension while adding an extra layer of difficulty: it changes too.

Two time periods intersect.

This is where the notion of a living work of art takes on its deepest meaning. It is not a slogan intended to inject dynamism into an institution. It is an almost embarrassing reality for all structures that need to fix things in order to administer them.

The law loves categories. Heritage loves reference states. Insurance loves identifiable objects. Inventory loves numbers. The Art Market loves being able to say where a work begins and ends. A work in transformation forces each of these systems to work harder.

I do not consider that a weakness.

On the contrary.

A work that forces institutions to improve their tools of perception perhaps fulfills one of the oldest functions of art: to render inadequate the categories with which we had come to it.

Here I find a conviction that runs through the entire Abode of Chaos: I want the work to open up a question rather than impose a reaction.

If the Abode of Chaos forces law, architecture, heritage, art history, and conservation to ask unusual questions, it is not because it seeks to artificially create a scandal. It is because its true nature does not easily fit into categories designed for stable objects.

The question then becomes almost philosophical: what is the identity of a work when its material changes?

The Ship of Theseus immediately springs to mind. If you gradually replace parts of a ship, at what point does it cease to be the same ship? The Abode of Chaos poses a similar but different question, because it is not simply a matter of replacement. It is about accumulation, growth, aging, reworking, and sometimes deliberate destruction. Some elements appear. Others are transformed. The landscape around them changes. Yet, no one who truly knows The Abode of Chaos doubts that it is still the same work.

For what?

Because its identity does not reside in the immobility of each of its molecules.

It resides in the continuity of a grammar, an intention, a conceptual authority, and a process.

That's the cosa mentale again.

It is what allows the physical form to change without losing its identity.

If I replace an element because it becomes dangerous, if I reclaim a surface, if vegetation alters a perspective, or if a new work appears in the system, the whole remains the Abode of Chaos because each of these decisions passes through the same generative principle.

I want to be unambiguous on this point: I am the sole author of the Total Work of Art of the Abode of Chaos. I am responsible for its conception, its decisions, and its continuity. It is this unity that allows the work to transform itself without ceasing to be itself.

Continuity, therefore, does not come from the complete conservation of matter.

It stems from the continuity of thought that organizes its transformations.

And this way of thinking certainly doesn't preclude learning. My companions can show me a new technique. A surveyor can produce a spatial analysis that helps me understand my work in a new light. A heritage architect can reveal repetitive structures that I had intuitively created but never mapped in this way. Artificial intelligence may, perhaps tomorrow, reveal correlations that I hadn't consciously formulated.

Receiving this knowledge does not mean losing the work.

This is precisely what allows us to continue analyzing it based on its own traces.

I believe this is one of the most interesting discoveries of recent years: the living work of art can begin to become its own object of analysis.

Surveys, photographs, archives, databases, videos, aerial views, and 3D models now allow us to compare its different states. We can follow the growth of an area, the evolution of a structure, the spread of a symbol, and the relationships between several groups of artworks. The place thus gradually acquires a memory of its own transformation.

This loop is fascinating.

The work leaves traces that we archive; these archives then allow us to understand the work differently. This understanding can influence future decisions. Memory then becomes an agent of transformation, and no longer simply a retrospective view.

This is exactly what happens in an organism with a nervous system: past experience modifies future responses.

I don't want to anticipate too early what we will develop later with artificial intelligence, but the logic is already visible. The Abode of Chaos is no longer just a physical place. It contains images, texts, measurements, videos, coordinates, and legal, historical, and artistic archives. As this memory becomes usable, a second Abode of Chaos forms around the first: not a duplicate that replaces it, but a cognitive layer that allows us to reinterpret the physical body.

Matter and data begin to communicate.

We will encounter this symmetry again later with Artprice.

For now, what matters is understanding that a work that refuses to end does not reject memory. On the contrary, it needs it. The more it transforms, the more essential it becomes to know what it once was. Without archives, transformation becomes amnesia. With archives, it becomes history.

There is a huge difference there.

To change without knowing what one was is to disappear.

To change while retaining a record of one's previous states is to evolve.

The Abode of Chaos belongs to this second logic.

And that is also why the tree is probably one of his most apt images. A tree never remains the same. Each year adds a ring. Some branches grow. Others die. A wound partially closes and remains visible. The roots spread into a space no one sees. Yet, for fifty or a hundred years, we say: it's the same tree.

Its identity is not immobility.

Its identity is the continuity of its living process.

Here I find something profoundly Spinozist. A being is not defined simply by an external form but by its power to persevere in its being, that is to say, by the dynamic continuity of the relationships that constitute it. The Abode of Chaos does not persevere by resisting all change. It perseveres precisely by transforming what happens to it without losing its inner law.

Perhaps that is what more than twenty-five years have taught me, in the end.

At first, I obviously thought of myself as an author, builder, sculptor, mental architect of the place. Over the years, I had to learn to also become its observer.

Something I had created was now producing effects that I could study.

I could explore the Abode of Chaos and discover a relationship between two areas that I had never consciously considered from that perspective. Not because another author had created it, but because hundreds of decisions made over more than twenty-five years could suddenly bring about an emergent structure.

This notion of emergence seems essential to me.

A complex system can produce properties that are not explicitly found in any of its individual elements. An ant does not contain the entire blueprint of the anthill. A neuron does not contain a thought on its own. A city does not reside in any of its buildings. Yet, the whole gives rise to new behaviors.

The Abode of Chaos, having reached thousands of interventions, necessarily operates at this level.

I ensure its grammar, its arbitration, and its continuity. But the accumulated complexity of the work can bring forth relationships that I had not anticipated and that I discover afterward in my own work.

There is no contradiction.

A writer can reread a book ten years later and discover a structure that he had not consciously formulated at the time of writing. He nevertheless remains the author of the book.

Why should sculpture be less profound than language?

At this scale, a work can become richer in relationships than the sum of the intentions explicitly formulated at the time of each of its gestures. Its complexity reveals relationships that were not necessarily conceived at the outset.

This is yet another reason why fractals, networks, rhizomes, and organisms appear so frequently in my vocabulary. They are different ways of describing systems in which meaning doesn't flow solely from top to bottom.

There are loops, feedback loops, emergences, areas of density, dead branches, and proliferations. And yet, an overall coherence remains.

The Abode of Chaos is probably the place where I was able to make this intuition materially visible.

I can enter a building, look at a wall, look up at a tree, simultaneously hear a server or a machine, glimpse a monumental sculpture in line with a fresco, and understand that all these things have ended up belonging to a single mental geography.

Thought has become spatially distributed.

It's no longer just in my brain.

It exists all around me.

A thought that becomes geography necessarily enters into time. And as soon as it enters into time, it ceases to be a finished drawing.

It becomes history.

That is why I have never felt the need to announce the end of the Abode of Chaos. There are stages. Sequences. Locally completed works. Stabilized sets. Anniversaries. Recognitions. But none of these stages constitutes a conclusion.

The conclusion would be the death of the organism.

Even after I'm gone, the question will remain.

And this sentence is difficult to write because it necessarily touches on transmission.

What becomes of a living work of art when its sole author is no longer there to exercise the conceptual authority that governed its transformations?

I don't want to answer too soon. The whole book will gradually lead us to this question, to Nadège, to Sydney, to archives, to institutions, to digital technology, to artificial intelligence and to everything that allows us to transmit without producing a copy.

But the material itself already compels us to hear it.

Perhaps a monumental sculpture will outlive my body.

A tree, too.

A database can store millions of records.

A video will record my voice.

A digital survey will establish a spatial state.

But none of these elements, taken in isolation, will be enough to preserve the living work of art if we lose the logic that links them.

The transmission will therefore have to extend beyond the objects themselves.

It will have to teach a grammar.

That's probably what I've been looking for from the beginning, without always having formulated it that way.

The 99 words were already an attempt to convey grammar.

The laboratory notebooks were.

The photographs.

The films.

The records.

The texts.

The trials, despite myself, also produced a huge amount of documentation on what the work was and what they were trying to make it become legally.

Everything eventually creates a distributed memory of the organism.

This memory will be essential so that the work can continue to evolve without being betrayed.

Because the danger to a living work of art is not only its destruction.

It is also his mummification.

An organism can be killed by letting it rot.

It can also be killed by preventing any transformation.

A poorly understood heritage protection could theoretically produce this paradox: wanting to protect the Abode of Chaos so much that it would be prevented from being the Abode of Chaos.

That is why the recognition of a living work of art will necessarily require inventing another way of protecting it.

Not to sanctify every millimeter as if time should stand still.

To protect the work's ability to continue according to its own law.

That's the real challenge.

And I realize today how this question takes on an almost ironic dimension after more than twenty-three years of conflict and legal proceedings, before finally achieving this recognition. For years, some tried to reduce the Abode of Chaos to categories that couldn't see it.

Now we must learn to protect it without reproducing, in the name of heritage, another inability to understand its nature.

This story will be told later.

For now, I'm staying in front of the tree.

He is probably the best teacher.

I can choose where to plant it. I can understand its species, anticipate its growth, work the space around it, prune it, protect it, and intervene if a branch becomes dangerous.

But I don't make each of its leaves.

And yet, although I have integrated it into the composition, each of its leaves temporarily belongs to the landscape of the work.

That's the whole subtlety of mastery.

Absolute mastery of the cosa mentale is not the absurd mastery of every future physical event.

It is the mastery of the principle according to which these events can be integrated or rejected.

I control the syntax.

The world then produces part of the vocabulary.

Time produces another one.

And my job is to keep the work true to itself in the midst of this conversation.

It is perhaps the most demanding form of creation I have ever known, because it never allows you to say: I am finished.

It compels one to return.

Observe.

Compare.

Decide.

Sometimes intervene.

Sometimes doing nothing is best.

And the choice to do nothing can be just as conceptual as a spectacular transformation.

I learned that an artist can end up stifling their work if they constantly add to it. I had to learn to recognize when time does it better than I can.

I have often found myself in front of a surface that I could have restored and decided that I absolutely must not touch it. Rain, oxidation, patina had produced something that I could never have obtained artificially without resorting to imitation.

So it was necessary to know when to stop.

This restraint is perhaps one of the most difficult forms of control.

It echoes what Marc sometimes told me: don't touch it anymore.

At that moment, the companion and the matter were giving the same lesson.

Letting live is not abandoning.

It's about watching long enough to know when the intervention would become a mistake.

I understand now that the Abode of Chaos shaped me as much as I shaped it.

This is probably what any work to which one devotes enough time means.

At first, the artist imposes a great deal.

Then the Total Work of Art acquires its own logic and begins to resist it.

If the artist remains intelligent, he listens to this resistance.

Not to relinquish his authority, but to understand what that authority has engendered.

This is how the Total Work of Art gradually ceases to be solely an object of will and becomes an interlocutor.

I use that word with caution.

I do not attribute any conscience to him.

I am simply saying that a complex system produces enough constraints and responses to force the person who built it to enter into a relationship of reading.

I'm doing something.

The system responds.

I am observing.

I may change my next decision.

There is a loop.

That's already a form of dialogue.

And when, many years later, I begin a dialogue with an artificial intelligence also capable of reproducing the structures of my own traces, I may perhaps rediscover something of that ancient experience.

I thought I was entering a completely new relationship.

In reality, I had spent more than twenty-five years learning that a materialized thought can come back to you in a form you hadn't anticipated.

The Abode of Chaos had prepared me for this.

It had taught me that I could remain the author of the Total Work of Art without being omniscient about all the relationships that its complexity would reveal.

It had taught me that discovering something in one's own work does not take anything away from the author.

It only proves that the work had acquired enough complexity to become a true field of knowledge.

That's why it refuses to finish.

Not on a whim.

No, because I would be incapable of making the final move.

It refuses to end because its very definition is incompatible with completion understood as immobility.

It belongs to the living world.

It receives its time.

It's accumulating its scars.

It archives its transformations.

It produces its fractals.

It allows the tree to become part of its architecture.

It transforms the landscape into syntax.

It remains faithful to a single cosa mentale while accepting that reality continues to provide it with material.

And it is precisely because it refuses to end that we must now leave its surface for a moment.

We met the companions who make incarnation possible, the matter that resists and remembers, and then the organism that continues to transform after the gesture.

But there is a place at the heart of this organism where all these lines converge.

A place that I designed as a physical extension of my own cognitive system.

An office that you have to walk on.

A sculpture weighing several tons.

Screens, archives, servers, paper, signs, objects, planetary flows.

A cave and simultaneously an interface with the world.

Until now, thought had become geography. We will have to enter the room where this geography becomes thought again.