I could try to choose a precise moment and say: everything began that day. That would be false. A work of this nature has no perfectly identifiable zero point. It has a period of crystallization.

1999 was that crystallization.

The moment when thoughts that had accompanied me for decades began to find a common territory.

Alchemy.

Matter.

The network.

Geopolitics.

Memory.

Sculpture.

Law.

Freedom.

Everything could now enter the same space.

I did not yet know that this territory would one day become a work of several thousand pieces, traveled by millions of visitors, studied by architects, historians, surveyors, academics, conservators, and scientists.

Nor did I know that on March 20, 2025, the Ministry of Culture would officially recognize the Abode of Chaos as a Total Work of Art, giving institutional recognition to what, at the beginning, still existed only as an intuition and a few gestures.

Above all, I did not yet know what this work would demand of us. Because a Total Work of Art does not require talent alone. It requires time. It requires bodies. It requires mistakes. It requires sacrifices.

Sometimes it requires giving up the comfort of separating life from work, studio from home, family from the work. We learned that gradually.

Around the Abode of Chaos were Nadège, Sydney, and then, over the years, craftspeople, researchers, metalworkers, engineers, historians, surveyors, photographers, computer scientists, conservators, restorers, and lawyers. Dozens, then hundreds of people passed through this history, some regularly, others only at particular moments.

When I look today at a Sentinel, a wall, a steel plate, a fragment of Ground Zero, or an invisible infrastructure, I never see only the object.

I see the hands.

The nights.

The discussions.

Repeated mistakes.

The face of the person who welded.

The face of the person who documented.

Nadège’s face, organizing what I sometimes launched in ten directions at once.

Heritage is never only the matter that remains. It is also the memory of the people who made it possible. That idea would accompany us throughout the construction of the Abode of Chaos.

It would be exactly the same when, years later, we returned to a sculpture more than twenty years old, sometimes nearly thirty. We would never try artificially to return it to its first day. We would try to understand what time had done to it. Because time is not the enemy of this work. It has become one of its media.

Rust works.

Paint evolves.

Trees grow.

Walls absorb.

Visitors pass through.

Events from the world enter the material.

Then the material answers.

In this way, the Abode of Chaos would begin to produce its own time. A time that is neither that of the traditional museum, nor that of a house, nor that of a worksite. An organic time. A time made of growth, wounds, conservation, transformations, and memory.

That is probably why, in 1999, I could not yet draw the Abode of Chaos as it exists today. Doing so would have contradicted its very nature. It had to invent itself as it was being made.

This idea, which I would encounter much later in Luigi Pareyson under the name formativity, was already there before it had received its philosophical vocabulary. I knew only one thing.

No definitive form should be imposed.

I had to accompany what was trying to appear.

That may seem paradoxical coming from a man who works with steel, welding, mass, industry, and sometimes structures weighing tens or hundreds of tons. But physical force is nothing unless it is preceded by listening to the material.

The sculptor knows this.

He quickly learns that matter cannot be constrained with impunity. You negotiate with it.

That is exactly what I was going to do with this place. I had not come to conquer it. I would learn to inhabit it. And gradually, it would learn to inhabit me as well.

In 1999, none of this was yet written. There was only a place.

Stone.

Trees.

Water.

Metal.

A few human beings.

And this conviction that has never left me since: what appears formless may only be waiting for a gaze to reveal the structure it already contained.

Domaine de la Source would become the place of that revelation.