What remained, then, was emptiness. Not a material emptiness. Domaine de la Source was there. The walls were there. The buildings, trees, pools, stones, networks, and objects were there. But after deciding that this place would no longer serve as the real-estate representation of my success, after beginning to strip away what I called its trappings, I found myself facing a much more difficult question:

What language would I now use to speak to matter?

I could not simply begin producing sculptures. That would have been too easy.

One sculpture calls for another. Then ten more. Then a hundred. You can accumulate forms for an entire lifetime without ever producing anything more than a collection.

I did not want a collection.

I did not even want a body of works.

The wall, the skin, the steel. The building, the park, the light. The sign, the body, the wound. Text and technology. I wanted a common principle to run through everything.

I wanted a piece of stone and a sentence to be able to belong to the same syntax. For a scarification cut into a wall to speak the same language as a tattoo on a body. For a number inscribed in matter to carry the same intensity as a volume weighing several tons. For a minute trace and a monumental architecture to be two conjugations of the same verb.

So I had to begin not with forms, but with words.

That is what I did on December 9, 1999.

I wrote a series of terms. Today they appear on the opening pages of works devoted to the Abode of Chaos:

marking, burn, signature, step, trace, demarcation, strike, writing, transmutation, coding, coat of arms, tattoo, scarification, rite, symbol, language, sign of war, reading, flourish, seal, stamp, cachet, mark, code, injunction, attribute, figure, scar, cryptogram, emblem, manifestation, ideogram, acronym, stigma, testimony, stroke, algorithm, allegory, figuration, hieroglyph, incarnation, mystery, metaphor, number, metamorphosis, transfiguration, arcana, sacred meaning, monogram.

The text then presented them as the “words and customs” claimed as defining this work carried out over several years and constituting the original works entitled: NUTRISCO ET EXTINGUO, The Spirit of the Salamander.

The text is dated. December 9, 1999.

It is important to understand what that means.

These words were not extracted from the Abode of Chaos after its completion. They were not the vocabulary a critic might have invented twenty years later in an attempt to classify the work.

They were there beforehand.

That reversal is what interests me. In most histories of art, the words come after the works.

One paints. One sculpts. One builds. Then historians, critics, and conservators step in.

They name. They classify. They draw connections. They divide reality into periods, movements, influences, and categories.

I was beginning almost in reverse.

I was creating a language before the work fully existed. I did not know exactly which sculptures would appear. I did not yet know the forms of Ground Zero, the Bunker, the Cages de l’Enfer, the Porteurs de Cendres, the Vanités, or the major ensembles that would eventually occupy Domaine de la Source.

But certain verbs were already there.

Mark.

Burn.

Write.

Transmute.

Code.

Scarify.

Read.

Incise.

Sign.

Transform.

It was not an iconographic program. It was deeper than that. It was a grammar of behaviors.

The word marking, for example, did not say what form would appear. It said that matter could no longer remain neutral. Something had to have touched it.

An intention. A gesture. A passage. Perhaps violence. A memory.

Marking immediately introduced time into matter. An untouched surface does not yet tell a story. A marked surface already has a before and an after.

The word trace worked in the same way.

A trace presupposes an absence. Someone or something has passed through. It may no longer be there, but it has altered reality.

That idea had obsessed me for a long time.

It runs through archaeology. It runs through law. It runs through art history. It runs through computing.

A trace can be a worked stone. A notarized deed. A signature. A computer log. A scar on a body. A photograph. A price written in an auction catalog. A burned wall.

The medium changes. The function remains: to attest that an event occurred.

That is probably why the words trace, testimony, signature, seal, cachet, flourish, stigma, and scar found their place so naturally in this first constellation.

They belong to different worlds.

Law. The body. Religion. Administration. War. Art.

And yet I perceived them as belonging to the same family.

They all said:

— Something happened.

I did not want to represent the world. I wanted to record its passage.

There were also the words of code.

Coding.

Code.

Figure.

Cryptogram.

Ideogram.

Algorithm.

Number.

They may seem surprising in an artistic vocabulary written in 1999. To me, they were obvious. I had already spent years immersed in databases, computer architectures, networks, indexing systems, and programming languages. I knew that a vast quantity of information could be governed by a few rules.

A database seems infinite to the person consulting it. To the person building it, it begins with an architecture.

Fields. Relationships. Identifiers. A classification system. A system of correspondences. A code.

I was doing exactly the same thing with the Abode of Chaos.

This time, without a computer. Or rather, with another computer: the place itself. I was giving it its primitives. Its alphabet. Its operators.

In 1999, of course, I was not thinking in terms of a “latent space” or a generative model, as we can today with artificial intelligence. But when I look back at this process, I recognize something profoundly familiar.

A few initial signs would produce a combinatorial field far larger than themselves. A finite vocabulary would generate an almost indefinite number of situations. That is what I now call the generative character of the 99 words.

They were not a legend. They were a matrix. Each word could combine with the others.

Burn could become writing.

Writing could become scarification.

Scarification could become sign.

The sign could become code.

The code could become number.

The number could become architecture.

Architecture could become rite.

The rite could become performance.

And the performance could leave a trace that restarted the cycle.

There was no longer any stable boundary between categories. A wall could simultaneously be support, sculpture, archive, skin, palimpsest, and message. A piece of steel could become a totem, signal, structure, threat, spatial marker, or simply a line drawn in space. A scar could be physical or architectural. A tattoo could appear on flesh, but the entire Abode itself could be conceived as a tattooed body.

That is when the words began to produce matter.

Not in a magical sense. In an operational sense.

Take the word scarification and move it from stone to steel, from skin to paint, from glass to concrete: you will never get the same thing twice. Yet a kinship will appear.

That invisible kinship was what interested me. Above all, I did not want to manufacture a decorative aesthetic recognizable at first glance. I wanted to create an alchemy.

The distinction is essential.

An aesthetic reproduces appearances. A genetic system reproduces principles of transformation. That is why the Abode of Chaos could evolve without losing its identity. It could welcome new materials. New technologies. New geopolitical events. New catastrophes. New faces.

It could change for more than twenty-five years without ceasing to be itself.

Because its identity did not rest on a fixed image.

It rested on a set of deep rules.

What the architectural study would much later call formativity corresponds exactly to this point.

The Total Work of Art is not merely a form. It is the process that continuously produces forms.

Twenty-five years after the beginning, Nicolas Detry, Raphaëlle Rivière, and the teams of land surveyors and geomatics specialists would study the site scientifically.

They would measure.

They would map.

They would superimpose the plans.

They would establish the additions and subtractions of matter.

They would identify the major series.

They would show that behind what might at first have seemed disorderly, an organization existed.

And the study would return specifically to the text of December 9, 1999, as one of the founding conceptual postulates of this process. This interests me enormously because the demonstration is retrospective.

In 1999, I produced a grammar.

In 2020 and 2021, surveyors, an art historian, and a heritage architect can measure the spatial consequences of that grammar.

Between the two lie twenty years of matter. It is almost a scientific experiment.

The hypothesis comes first. Reality develops.

Then others come to observe what has occurred. They discover that certain structures repeat.

Series. Points. Alignments. Accumulations. Rhythms. Recurring artistic gestures.

That does not mean everything was planned. Quite the opposite.

A generative system worthy of the name does not predict every result. It defines the conditions under which unforeseen results can appear without becoming arbitrary. That is the entire difference between randomness and chaos. Pure randomness has no memory. Chaos carries its initial conditions.

I always returned to that. A few differences at the beginning can, over time, produce different worlds.

The 99 words were my initial conditions.

They also contained something much older than computing. They contained the hermetic language.

Transmutation.

Arcana.

Sacred meaning.

Metamorphosis.

Transfiguration.

Incarnation.

Mystery.

The word transmutation was probably one of the most important. It prevented us from seeing materials only as what they already were.

Steel was not condemned to remain steel.

Stone was not condemned to remain architecture.

Industrial waste could change status.

A ruin could become a work.

A functional element could enter a sculptural ritual.

A house could become a museum.

A museum could become a sculpture.

A sculpture could become architecture.

Alchemy therefore did not give me an esoteric decor. It gave me a theory of transformation. That is something entirely different.

I never wanted to place a few alchemical symbols on the walls to manufacture mystery artificially. That would have been theater. What interested me was the very mechanism of the Great Work:

take a material,

subject it to operations,

decompose it,

recompose it,

make it change state,

and accept that the operator is himself transformed by the experience.

That is why the word incarnation was there. The Abode of Chaos was not supposed to illustrate a thought.

It had to incarnate it. In other words: give it a body. And that body would necessarily encounter my own.

This is where the vocabulary becomes more unsettling.

Tattoo.

Scar.

Scarification.

Stigma.

These words speak of wounded surfaces, but of a wound that becomes a sign.

An accidental wound normally seeks to disappear.

A scar remains despite us.

But when a sign is deliberately inscribed into a body or into matter, the wound changes status. It enters language. It becomes deliberate memory.

I wanted the architecture to bear stigmata.

Not to simulate a catastrophe. But because our world itself was covered in stigmata.

Clean walls seemed dishonest to me. They created the illusion that nothing had happened.

Yet the twentieth century had just left behind an almost unimaginable quantity of ruins, borders, genocides, wars, destroyed cities, displaced populations, and technological revolutions.

And we were entering the next century as though a simple change of millennium could whitewash the walls.

I rejected that whitewashing.

The world leaves traces. Art had to accept them. Hence the sign of war. The expression is harsh. It had to be.

But here again, one has to understand what I meant.

I was not glorifying war.

I was constructing a semiology of its traces.

War alters landscapes. It alters buildings. It alters bodies. It alters signs. It produces its own markings: territories, uniforms, flags, inscriptions, destruction, scars, monuments, graves, archives.

The sign of war therefore belongs first and foremost to the realm of reading.

And among the founding words is precisely reading. It may be one of the least spectacular. Yet it is essential.

Because a sign that can never be read is nothing more than a form.

I wanted the Abode of Chaos to be readable. Not like a linear book. Certainly not. More like a text in which several sentences were visible at once.

You could enter anywhere. Focus on a detail. Look up. Go back. Connect one image with another. Form your own hypothesis.

The visitor would not receive a definitive caption.

He would have to work. He would become a reader.

And every reader partly rewrites what he reads.

That is why the Abode of Chaos was never meant to provide a single interpretation. I could know its genealogy. I could explain my references. But I did not want to confiscate meaning.

The heritage study would much later put it very accurately: the works, often without captions, leave interpretation open and involve the public in constructing the meaning of the site.

That openness did not mean that all interpretations were equal. That is a common confusion.

A polysemous work is not a work without structure. Quite the opposite. The deeper the structure, the more readings it allows.

I needed rules strong enough for the Abode of Chaos to possess an identity, but open enough that it would never become its own instruction manual.

That, again, is the role of vocabulary. A word never contains all its future sentences.

The word fire does not yet tell us whether it will burn a house, light a night, purify matter, or designate a passion. But it creates a field of possibilities.

The 99 words worked that way.

They opened fields.

Then those fields would intersect.

Over the years, they ceased to exist only in writing. They left the page.

They became steel.

Paint.

Concrete.

Stone.

Sweat.

Fire.

Body.

Video.

Performance.

Architecture.

They even became physical series.

The catalog of the Abode thus mentions the 99 Initiatory Totems, made of raw steel twenty millimeters thick, each offering the visitor a reading drawn from the “99 words and customs defining the Abode of Chaos.”

That is what I mean today when I say that the words eventually became the place.

It is not a metaphor. You can walk among them. You can touch them. They cast shadows. They rust. They have weight. They resist the wind.

Language acquired mass.

In this transformation I find something that connects with a very old intuition of mine. Thought is never completely separate from matter.

A spoken word disappears almost immediately. A written word already begins to weigh. Engrave it in steel and it acquires another status. Inscribe it into an architecture and it may outlive the person who conceived it.

Every civilization knows this transformation.

Tablets.

Steles.

Temples.

Epitaphs.

Pediments.

Seals.

Coins.

Manuscripts.

Codes.

We spend our time giving abstraction a body so that it will not disappear. The Abode of Chaos would push this operation to the extreme. And yet something was still missing.

I had the words. I had the operations. I had the matter. I had understood that the Total Work of Art would operate through transformation, not accumulation.

But a grammar is not enough. You also need a cosmology. You need to know the universe in which these signs acquire meaning.

Why Chaos?

Which Chaos?

The Chaos of science?

The Chaos of the alchemists?

The Chaos we perceive in the contemporary world?

These three realities bore the same name. Yet they were not identical.

I had to understand how they fit together.

That is when what would become the Triptych of Chaos began to emerge. I needed to connect three worlds we had grown accustomed to separating: the measurable world, the hermetic world,

and the visible world.

Science. Alchemy. Representation.

The words had given the Abode of Chaos its alphabet. Now I had to discover the secret geometry that connected them.