I had given the museum a name. I had begun to give it a status. Yet the hardest part remained. There was still an almost obscene contradiction between what I was beginning to understand and what Domaine de la Source had become.

For nearly ten years, I had worked to save it.

When we entered it in 1990, under a commercial lease with an option to purchase, the estate was emerging from more than a decade of abandonment. The buildings leaked. Roof structures and floors were damaged by humidity. Wild animals had taken over some rooms. The utility systems no longer worked. In the grounds, brambles—some of them almost tree-sized—had reclaimed the site. Beneath part of the land were still tons of waste from neighboring construction projects.

We had to clear, sanitize, drain, consolidate, redo the roofs, repair the foundations, restore electricity, plumbing, and heating. We had to remove dozens of dumpsters of rubble and accumulated objects. We had to restore the walls to their first function: standing up.

I learned about the estate through work.

Stone after stone.

Roof after roof.

System after system.

I had spent years restoring its value. And that was precisely what had become the problem. As Domaine de la Source came back to life, something in me was moving away from it. I had saved it from ruin and, without immediately realizing it, led it toward another kind of death: representation.

Everything was clean again. Habitable. Controlled. Socially legible.

Domaine de la Source now testified to success. It possessed that silent grammar common to every bourgeois residence: careful restoration, selected materials, maintained grounds, objects, furniture, architecture restored to dignity, the general impression that the world is in its place and that the person living there has found his own.

I no longer believed in it.

Or rather, I suddenly understood that I had never worked so hard to reach something that resembled me so little.

It is one of the most violent paradoxes of my existence: I had to restore Domaine de la Source completely in order to understand that I now had to sacrifice it.

I do not use the word sacrifice as a literary image.

To sacrifice means to remove something from its ordinary use and give it another destination.

Domaine de la Source had to cease being property. It had to become a Total Work of Art.

The shift occurred on December 9, 1999.

That date appears everywhere in the Abode of Chaos because it is not a commemorative date added after the fact. It belongs to the source code.

That evening, the question was not:

What am I going to build?

The question was infinitely more radical:

What must I destroy in myself so that something can begin?

That is why Chaos, before it became external, was internal.

For a long time, I had worked on alchemy. I knew the materia prima, the nigredo, the necessity of passing through dark matter. Intellectually, I knew that no transmutation begins with gold. It begins in the undifferentiated, the black, the dissolution of prior forms.

But there is an immense difference between understanding a doctrine and accepting that it operate on your own existence.

On December 9, 1999, I stopped treating alchemy as a library. It became a protocol.

I had to enter the dry path.

The fastest path. The most brutal. The one that does not grant you the comfort of gradual transformation.

I then wrote a sentence that would become a rule:

“Everything that remains of bourgeois display must drown in a state of permanent war.”

I know what that sentence can produce when detached from its context.

One can hear violence in it.

One can project a political declaration onto it.

One can imagine some form of social hatred.

That would miss exactly what I was writing.

The war I was speaking about targeted no one. It took place inside.

What I was declaring war on was display. Representation. Prestige. The idea that accumulating outward signs of success could produce anything other than a conventional identity. Intellectual comfort. Certainty. The ego beginning to believe in its own statue. The golden calf.

I had spent part of my existence building companies that produced value. Groupe Serveur, then Artprice, were founded on organization, measurement, information, networks, law, precision. I have never despised the creation of wealth. That would be absurd and hypocritical. I knew too well its difficulty, responsibility, and power.

But precisely because I knew that power, I also knew its trap.

Success produces its own scenery.

One day, you no longer know very well whether you possess the signs of your success or whether they possess you.

Domaine de la Source had become the physical place of that question for me. I had to strip it of its function of representation. And because I did not want that resolution to remain one more idea, I inscribed it in matter.

A thought that changes nothing in reality has always seemed suspect to me.

I come from a world in which a hypothesis has to meet experiment, a theory has to face the field, a computer program eventually runs or crashes, a contract produces consequences, and a sculpture has to stand under its own weight.

I therefore could not write that bourgeois display had to disappear and continue living peacefully among its signs.

I had to act in material form.

This is where the deconstruction of the Abode of Chaos truly begins. Later, much was said about destruction.

The word is imperfect.

I had no desire to destroy for destruction’s sake. On the contrary, I had just spent nearly a decade saving these buildings from disappearance. I knew what a real ruin was. I knew what a collapsing roof structure was, masonry saturated with moisture, a rotten floor, a roof open to the elements.

What I was about to undertake was of another nature.

It was a matter of deconstructing use value and representational value in order to reveal artistic value. That explains a gesture that, viewed from traditional real-estate economics, appears perfectly irrational.

A normal owner improves his property. Increases usable space. Simplifies circulation. Beautifies. Neutralizes irregularities. Repairs cracks. Protects facades. Reduces unnecessary loads. Maximizes real-estate value.

I gradually did the opposite.

The work would take space away from the habitable. Full and sometimes impenetrable volumes would enter the buildings.

The stone walls would be hollowed out, marked, scarified.

The surfaces would cease to be neutral.

Stone blocks would weigh down the roofs like meteorites.

Steel would penetrate the architecture.

The furniture, gardens, facades, and floors themselves would cease to belong to the decor and enter the work.

Over time, it would become impossible to say: here is the building, here is the sculpture, here is the park, here is the museum, here is the Total Work of Art.

The categories would begin to contaminate one another. That was exactly what I was seeking. I wanted to abolish the boundary between container and content.

Later, architects, historians, and surveyors would be able to measure this process with scientific rigor. They would document additions of matter, removals, transformations of volumes, major recurring gestures, and the way the work had physically penetrated Domaine de la Source.

But in 1999, I obviously did not have before me the hundreds of plans, three-dimensional surveys, and heritage studies that would be produced twenty years later.

I was facing matter.

And matter resisted.

That is essential.

Because when the Abode of Chaos is discussed retrospectively, one can create the impression that a concept existed beforehand in its entirety and simply had to be executed.

It never worked that way. I had principles.

Obsessions. Words. References. An inner direction.

But not an architect’s plan showing the Abode of Chaos as it would be more than twenty-five years later.

The Total Work of Art discovered itself as it was made.

It moved forward through trials. Errors. Revisions. Intuitions. Resistance from material. Fortunate accidents. Bifurcations.

And already through what I would now call weak signals. A crack could call for another intervention. One piece of steel could impose a second. A perspective revealed from scaffolding could alter an ensemble conceived at ground level. A form appeared, then its surroundings demanded its transformation.

Chaos was therefore not the absence of order.

It was an order that was not yet readable.

That is a fundamental distinction. In ordinary language, chaos means disorder. In my work, it meant exactly the opposite: the state in which an infinity of possible forms coexist before a structure appears.

I found there what the sciences of Chaos had taught me.

An apparently disordered system can obey extremely precise structures. A local disturbance can transform the whole. Organized forms can emerge from phenomena the naive eye considers random.

That scientific idea met alchemy.

Two languages separated by centuries were telling me, each in their own way, that the undifferentiated was not nothingness. It contained possibility.

That is why I could look at blackness without seeing death in it.

“When you see blackness, rejoice, for it is the beginning of the Work.”

That sentence from the founding text was not an indulgence in darkness. It stated a method.

Accept losing the known form.

Accept no longer being immediately understood.

Accept that an estate restored with considerable care might deliberately be removed from the logic that had justified that restoration.

Accept even the economically aberrant idea of reducing the value of a property in order to increase its power of meaning.

I believe that is where the most difficult act lies. People often imagine an artist takes risks when creating something new.

That is true.

But the deepest risk sometimes consists in destroying what worked perfectly.

Domaine de la Source worked.

It was restored. Enhanced. Comfortable. It could have continued that way. All I had to do was nothing.

That possibility had become intolerable to me.

Because a life can function perfectly and already be dead.

A company can function. An institution can function. An aesthetic can function. A language can function.

And it is precisely at that moment that one must sometimes introduce the imbalance that will prevent the system from closing in on itself.

I have always distrusted systems when they become too satisfied with their own perfection. Dysfunction reveals. Fracture shows the structure. Accident makes visible what continuous functioning had ended up concealing.

Domaine de la Source therefore had to lose its tranquility.

I no longer wanted to inhabit a finished representation of myself. I wanted to inhabit a question.

That may be the simplest sentence for describing what happened then. The Abode of Chaos was not born from a desire to provoke. Provocation waits for a reaction. It still depends on the person it claims to shock.

A work that merely provoked would remain prisoner of the other person’s gaze.

I was looking for something much more difficult: to build a place that questions. That questions me first. Then those who enter it.

A place before which it becomes difficult to preserve one’s categories intact.

Is it a house? A museum? A sculpture? An architecture? An archive? A ruin? A laboratory?

A Total Work of Art? A corporate headquarters? A political space? A landscape?

I did not want to answer too quickly.

The Abode of Chaos had to produce that hesitation.

Because between two categories there is sometimes an extraordinarily fertile zone: the place where the mind, deprived of its automatic answer, begins working again. But before I could produce that question in the viewer, I had to accept it for myself.

I had to stop knowing what my own house was going to become.

That was inner Chaos.

Not losing reason. Voluntarily losing certain certainties. Placing in crisis the image of self that success had constructed. Removing symbolic protections.

Accepting that the work becomes more important than preservation of its support.

And above all understanding that after spending ten years fighting the material destruction of Domaine de la Source, I would now have to fight a much more insidious destruction: the destruction produced by perfection when it forbids metamorphosis.

Then the trappings began to fall. And when they fell, I discovered something I had not anticipated.

Beneath the bourgeois estate, the Abode of Chaos did not yet exist.

There was a void.

An available space. Matter without language.

I knew what I no longer wanted. I did not yet know exactly how to name what was coming.

So I had to invent a grammar.

Not an architectural program. Not a catalog of works. Not an aesthetic. A grammar capable of producing the work before its forms even existed.

That night, Chaos had done its first work: it had destroyed the old sentence. The words of the next one still had to be found.

There would be ninety-nine.