Thierry speaks; I render. Between the two, our dialogue does its work.

— Isis

The words had given the Abode of Chaos its alphabet. But an alphabet does not yet produce thought. It makes thought possible. I now had signs, operations, verbs, possible gestures. I could mark, burn, scarify, code, inscribe, transmute. I knew that matter could no longer remain passive and that Domaine de la Source had to become the physical body of a thought.

One considerable difficulty remained.

What Chaos was I talking about?

The word is dangerous because it seems self-evident. Everyone thinks they know what Chaos is.

A messy office is chaotic. A bombed city is chaotic. A disorganized crowd is chaotic. A political system in collapse is chaotic. A mind no longer able to order its representations can be described as chaotic.

Everyday language eventually reduced the word to a single idea:

Disorder.

But the Chaos that interested me meant almost exactly the opposite. It did not designate the absence of order. It designated the state from which an order can emerge.

That difference was fundamental. It would govern the entire Abode of Chaos.

So above all, I did not want to build a disorderly place. That would have been trivial. Anyone can produce disorder. You simply organize nothing. True Chaos is infinitely more demanding. It requires being able to stand before an apparently incoherent multiplicity and understand that a deep structure is already at work beneath what the eye cannot yet read.

This is where three worlds that had accompanied me for a long time began to converge.

The first was alchemy. The second, science. The third, the visible world—the one everyone spontaneously calls Chaos when they can no longer understand how it is organized.

I eventually called their convergence the Triptych of Chaos.

Three forms of Chaos. Three languages. Three levels of reading. And yet a single work.

The first was the oldest. Alchemical Chaos. It existed long before modern scientific theories. Before computers. Before differential equations. Before fractals. Before even the Western distinction between matter and spirit that we so often take for granted.

In ancient cosmogonies, Chaos precedes separation. Before the elements are distributed. Before forms are named. Before above is separated from below, dry from wet, light from darkness.

There is an undifferentiated first matter. An obscure totality. A power already containing future forms before any one of them has been definitively separated from the others.

That was my materia prima.

Alchemical Chaos is therefore not the failure of order. It is the condition of its birth. That makes it possible to understand why blackness mattered so much. It was not a Gothic aesthetic. It was not an adolescent taste for darkness. Nor was it a morbid staging.

Blackness belongs to the beginning of the Work.

The nigredo.

Matter must lose its former identity. Earlier forms must be dissolved. Something must die symbolically for transformation to become possible.

I had experienced exactly that with Domaine de la Source.

I had restored it.

I had restored an identity to it.

Then I had had to destroy that identity.

The bourgeois estate had to enter its own night. What was clean had to be blackened. What was smooth had to receive wounds. What was vertical could be thrown off-axis. What had a function could lose it. What was architectural could become sculpture. What was considered deterioration could be incorporated into the process of the work.

The cuts in the walls, the meteorites placed on the buildings, the Alchemical Blades, the writings, the vegetation, the portraits, the alchemical principles, and the action of time itself would eventually become manifestations of this original Chaos. That is exactly how the heritage study would later describe this first dimension of the Triptych.

This point is essential because alchemy did not come to decorate the Abode of Chaos. It preceded it.

The Abode of Chaos was born from Fulcanelli’s Les Demeures philosophales. I return to this sentence often because it prevents a misunderstanding. I did not build a contemporary work and then decide to introduce a little esotericism into it.

Alchemy was already part of the matrix.

For a long time, I had worked with this tradition in both of its dimensions. Speculative alchemy. And operative alchemy. One works on knowledge, the subject, inner transformation, and access to different levels of reading. The other confronts matter.

Metals. Acids. Oxidations. Patinas. Temperatures. Reactions. Support. Time.

Either one without the other would have seemed incomplete to me. An exclusively speculative alchemy always risks becoming literature. An exclusively operative alchemy risks being reduced to proto-chemistry. What interested me was precisely the tension between them. Transform matter in order to understand what transformation means. And accept that the operator never emerges entirely unchanged from the operation.

I found again an idea that already ran through my life. Real knowledge leaves a trace on the person who receives it. Afterward, you do not know as you knew before. Otherwise nothing has happened.

This logic would gradually permeate the Abode of Chaos. But it encountered a second vision of Chaos, one belonging to the contemporary scientific world.

Scientific Chaos.

Here again, a clarification is necessary. The term does not mean that scientists study disorder in the trivial sense. On the contrary, it describes systems governed by laws that can produce developments that are extraordinarily difficult to predict. There was an essential key to understanding here.

A determined structure. Rules. Initial conditions. And yet an infinity of possible trajectories. The future exists as a space of possibilities without being reducible to a simple mechanical repetition of the past.

I recognized something that corresponded intimately to the way I think. I have never believed that complexity abolishes structure. I believe exactly the opposite. The more complex a system becomes, the more we must look for the deep rules that produce its forms. That was already my work with databases.

Faced with several million pieces of information, there are two possible attitudes. You can say: it is too much. Or you can ask: what architecture will make all of this readable?

I have never liked the first answer.

Quantity does not frighten me. Nor does heterogeneity. What interests me is the relationship.

How does one element act on another?

What repeats?

What branches off?

What apparently insignificant signal will later produce a major transformation?

Where does an anomaly reveal a structure we could not see?

Chaos theory therefore spoke to me in an extraordinarily concrete way. There was Edward Lorenz. There was Benoît Mandelbrot. Their faces themselves would enter the Abode of Chaos, together with the concepts, numbers, figures, and scientific formulations connected with that universe. Opus IX explicitly associates Lorenz and Mandelbrot with this body of scientific references inscribed in the work.

I wanted science to stop being kept outside the artistic domain.

Why should a portrait of a scientist seem less legitimate on a wall than a portrait of a painter?

Why should an equation have less visual power than a poem?

Why should a curve, a fractal structure, a number, or a diagram be condemned to remain in a laboratory or a book?

That separation has always seemed artificial to me.

Leonardo da Vinci knew perfectly well that it did not exist. For him, observing the turbulence of water, dissecting a body, studying light, building a machine, and painting all belonged to the same act of knowledge. Cosa mentale. Art is a mental thing.

But a mental thing that must ultimately encounter matter.

I also found Pythagoras again.

“Everything is number.”

That sentence haunted me. A number can describe. But it can also organize. It can become proportion. Rhythm. Frequency. Distance. Repetition. Cycle. Position. Probability.

An entire architecture can be contained in a numerical relationship. Music as well. A database. A sculpture. A market. A network.

So why should number stand outside art?

In the Abode of Chaos, it would enter the skin of the Total Work of Art.

The sciences of Chaos gave me, above all, another way of thinking about the unpredictable. It was no longer a matter of saying:

I do not know what will happen because nothing is organized.

But:

I know that something is organized, and yet I cannot reduce the future to a single trajectory.

That difference is dizzying. It corresponds exactly to creation.

When I begin a sculpture, I do not work at random. I know the materials. The weight. The resistances. The support points. The constraints. I know where I want to go.

But if I knew from the first second exactly what the work would be, why make it? I would only have to execute it. Creation begins precisely when execution encounters something that was not entirely present in the plan.

A resistance. A bifurcation. A discovery.

Matter answers. Sometimes it proposes something better than the idea.

The Total Work of Art then begins to produce its own necessity. Scientific Chaos and formativity would therefore meet.

I set a direction.

I create initial conditions.

I define constraints.

I produce.

Then something emerges.

And what emerges, in turn, transforms the conditions of the next gesture.

That is why the Abode of Chaos could grow for years without a fixed overall plan while retaining an extremely strong coherence.

It was not improvised. It was emergent.

Those are not the same thing.

The 2021 study would provide a demonstration that I find almost unsettling. At first glance, the authors write, the thousands of works, the sculptures, the containers, the Bunker, and the relationships between the installations and the buildings appear to obey nothing more than the arbitrariness of their creator. Yet their study shows that codes, intentions, relationships, and a deep formativity do exist, even if that structure is not immediately visible.

Twenty years earlier, I did not possess their scientific vocabulary for the work. I possessed intuition.

Chaos could produce a geometry. And that geometry did not need to be immediately visible in order to exist.

The third Chaos was much simpler in appearance. It was everyone’s chaos.

Figurative Chaos.

Or, to use the words of the heritage study, chaos in the ordinary sense. The one the visitor sees first.

The works accumulate. Layers overlap. Colors collide. Texts encounter faces. Faces encounter metal structures.

Historical figures that conventional morality would prefer to keep apart sometimes appear within the same visual field.

Happy events and tragic events occupy the same space. Time itself seems to have lost its order.

One century enters into dialogue with another. A philosopher may stand beside a head of state.

A figure of resistance beside a figure of power. A scientist beside a popular icon. A mystic beside a hacker. A perpetrator may exist only a few yards from his victim.

This is where many people make a mistake.

They imagine that juxtaposition means equivalence. It does not. An archive does not absolve what it preserves. A history museum does not assign the same moral value to every face it presents.

Memory is not a reward. It is an obligation.

So I did not want to build a Pantheon. The Pantheon selects. It honors. It separates those deemed worthy of memory from those who might be abandoned to oblivion.

The Abode of Chaos works differently.

Its memory is much closer to an archive. It records what acts upon the world. The sublime as well as the abject. Genius as well as catastrophe. Courage as well as crime. Utopias as well as their ruins. Because understanding an era requires looking at what it would have preferred to erase.

This is probably where my practice at Artprice connected most deeply with the Abode of Chaos. A serious database does not preserve only pleasant auction results. It preserves facts. It keeps ruptures. Values. Failures. Records. Anomalies. Memory becomes relevant because it refuses to rewrite reality retroactively according to what would suit us today.

At the Abode of Chaos, I was applying that logic to contemporary history.

A nonselective memory.

Sediments. Successive layers. Faces. Machines. Structures. Inscriptions.

The heritage study would later describe a kind of machine for recording time, built through successive additions and subtractions, in which apparent incoherence ultimately forms a coherent contemporary archive of the ruins of our civilization. I could not have put it better.

A machine for recording time.

That is what the Abode of Chaos was gradually becoming.

And this machine does not operate like a chronology. Historical time does not move politely from left to right. It returns. It folds back on itself. It superimposes. It contaminates.

The past enters the present. The present rereads the past.

A new event can suddenly give another meaning to a work made ten years earlier. A catastrophe can awaken a symbol thought dormant. An old photograph can become prophetic after the fact, not because it predicted the future, but because the future reveals a reading that was not yet available.

I have always thought History worked that way. Not like a highway. Like a field of forces.

We think we are looking at the past. But the past looks at us as well. This is where Walter Benjamin enters.

His Angelus Novus is important for understanding the Abode of Chaos. The angel looks backward. Where we see an ordered succession of events, he sees an accumulation of catastrophes. The ruins rise. And the wind we call progress drives him toward a future he cannot see.

The study devoted to the Abode of Chaos would choose this very image to open its analysis, explicitly connecting the accumulation of catastrophes and skepticism toward progress with my work.

I did not need art to reassure me about the world. I wanted it to help me see it.

That is radically different. A Total Work of Art is not obligated to produce a better world. It may have the more modest and more demanding obligation of making the real world harder to avoid.

That is why I have always rejected the word provocation.

I repeat: the Total Work of Art must question, not provoke. Provocation would be too poor. A provocative image often exhausts itself in the reaction it triggers. A real question can work on someone for twenty years.

I wanted that kind of duration. And to create that duration, the signs had to resist immediate reading.

This is where the Triptych of Chaos meets the hermetic frescoes. Very early on, the walls became surfaces for inscription. That seems almost inevitable when one rereads the 99 words.

Writing.

Cryptogram.

Hieroglyph.

Symbol.

Number.

Arcana.

Seal.

Monogram.

Code.

Reading.

All of them demanded a support.

The Abode of Chaos would become that support. But here again, a false image must be set aside. I never wanted to turn the facades into a simple illustrated book of alchemy. I had no interest in copying a few famous plates to produce an erudite decor. What took shape was infinitely broader.

Approximately 900 alchemical frescoes and engravings.

That number changes the scale. These were no longer scattered references. They formed a corpus.

They run through the private spaces.

The offices.

The workshops.

The circulation spaces.

The exterior walls.

The places accessible to the public and those that are not.

On their own, they could almost form a specialized museum within the museum. Our earlier work established precisely this function: the 900 alchemical frescoes and engravings form a coherent iconographic corpus, derived from an alchemy that is both speculative and operative.

I deeply loved this idea of knowledge that does not surrender itself entirely to whoever passes by. The contemporary world has accustomed us to the opposite. Everything must be immediately readable.

An image. A title. A caption. Three lines of explanation. Then on to the next.

I wanted to slow that reflex.

The hermetic sign is almost a form of political resistance to instant reading. It tells you:

— You can see without understanding. You can understand something without understanding everything. You can return. You can search. You can be wrong. You can learn.

That possibility seems fundamental to me. We lost part of our intellectual freedom when we began to believe that everything had to be immediately translated.

Some things benefit from resisting. Not to manufacture secrecy artificially. But because real knowledge sometimes requires time.

I had known this experience since my religious studies. A text is never only its first meaning. Kabbalah. The Talmud. Christian readings. Hermeneutics. Sufism. Initiatory traditions had taught me that the same sign can open differently depending on who looks at it, on that person’s state of knowledge, and on the moment in life. That does not mean every interpretation is true. It means a sign sometimes has several depths.

The hermetic museum of the Abode of Chaos is built on that possibility. The uninitiated viewer sees an image. The historian may recognize an iconographic lineage. The alchemist identifies an operation. The chemist may read a material transformation. The psychoanalyst sees something else. The visual artist something else again. And a child may see only an animal, a flame, a strange form that attracts or unsettles him.

None of these ways of seeing exhausts the sign.

That is why I speak of a museum of signs. Not a museum of answers. I wanted the walls to become an active surface of intelligence. They had to act like certain ancient manuscripts whose plates one can spend years looking at without ever closing their interpretation definitively. This idea connects directly with the Abode of Chaos as a whole.

There is no single point of view from which it suddenly becomes perfectly explicable.

You have to move through it.

Change your angle.

Enter.

Leave.

Look from a window.

From a terrace.

From the ground.

From a lift platform.

Later, from a drone.

Spatiality participates in hermeneutics. Meaning also depends on where you are looking from. This would become even more evident as the portraits multiplied. Because the face is itself a sign. Probably one of the oldest.

Before writing, we were already reading faces.

Anger. Fear. Fatigue. Desire. Danger. Kindness. Authority. Fragility.

We are biologically built for this kind of reading. That is why portraits became so important in the Abode of Chaos.

Over the years, they formed a corpus of approximately 1,800 portraits. Yet reducing it to geopolitical portraits alone would miss its true architecture. I brought into it political leaders and geopolitical figures, philosophers and humanists, scientists and the fathers of artificial intelligence, sociologists and anthropologists, religious and Masonic figures, artists, writers and major literary figures, science-fiction authors, as well as pioneering women who opened new territories of thought, science, art, or emancipation.

These categories are not sealed compartments. They intersect. A scientist can be a philosopher; a writer can anticipate a technological rupture; a political figure can become an object of history; a pioneering woman can belong simultaneously to several of these genealogies. It is precisely this network of relationships that interests me.

They are immediately accessible, but never simple.

A face is not a caption. It carries History.

And when several faces belonging to incompatible ideological, scientific, political, religious, or artistic worlds appear on the same wall, the viewer has to begin thinking again.

Why are they together?

What do they say about their time?

What relationship exists between them?

Who was looking at whom?

Who destroyed what?

Who discovered what?

Who resisted?

Who lied?

Who transmitted?

The wall becomes a table of relationships. Almost a database without a screen.

I return again to Artprice. Clearly, that is no accident. In a database, value does not reside only in each record. It resides in the relationships among the records.

An artist. A work. A date. An Auction House. A price. A place. An exhibition. A provenance.

Taken separately, each of these elements is poor. Connected, they produce knowledge. The frescoes worked in the same way.

A portrait alone says little. Place it within a system of two thousand other signs, and it becomes a node.

The Abode of Chaos was beginning to function like an enormous material graph, long before I could use that language. The walls were the interfaces. The portraits, numbers, sentences, symbols, and works were the nodes.

The visitor produced the relationships.

This architecture also explains why I did not want to caption the works systematically. A caption provides information. But it also produces a hierarchy.

It says: look here. Understand this. Then move on.

I preferred the visitor to get a little lost.

Not to humiliate him. To give him back his freedom.

Lost enough for his intelligence to begin producing its own paths again. That is one function of Chaos: temporarily removing the automatisms of reading.

You arrive with your categories: art, architecture, house, company, museum, park, ruin, data center, sculpture, religion, science, politics.

And the place politely refuses to remain in a single box. It forces you to negotiate.

I deeply believe that this negotiation is fertile. We are all constructed through classifications. We need them. Without them, the world would be unreadable. But one day they also become prisons. Art can then do something very simple: move the partitions.

The Abode of Chaos was becoming precisely that operation. Scientific Chaos prevented disorder from being arbitrary. Alchemical Chaos prevented matter from being inert. Figurative Chaos prevented History from being sanitized. The frescoes prevented the sign from being reduced to a single reading.

And the whole gradually produced an order that no longer belonged to the original categories.

That is the Triptych. No one panel should ever be isolated from the others.

Without science, alchemy might have been taken for a decorative belief.

Without alchemy, science might have become a cold collection of formulas.

Without the figurative world, the other two might have remained abstract.

But when the three locked together, they produced a machine of perception. The visitor could enter through what he knew.

The ruin.

The face.

A sentence.

A formula.

A sculpture.

An image from current events.

Then the system drew him elsewhere. That is exactly what I wanted.

A work that does not first ask what you know, but uses what you already know to take you where you had not expected to go.

The Abode of Chaos became initiatory in this precise sense. Not because it reserved a secret for a chosen few. But because it required movement.

Entering was not enough. You had to travel through it.

Read.

Associate.

Be wrong.

Return.

The journey became an experience of transformation.

The architectural study would later describe it as an initiatory and alchemical journey through time, space, religions, and human beings. I recognize that movement perfectly. But this initiation could not remain abstract. At some point, it had to encounter the body. Until then, I had worked on the house as a body.

Scarified walls. Openings. Entrails. Circulations. Wounds. Painted skins. Signs.

The bodily vocabulary was everywhere. But as long as the human body itself remained at a distance, something was missing.

Alchemy speaks of matter. It also speaks of the operator. Religions speak of signs. They also speak of incarnation. Rites are never only ideas. They make people walk. Kneel. Rise. Fast. Breathe. Touch. Carry. Cross. Sometimes suffer.

The body is the first place where a thought ceases to be abstract. I knew that. The Abode of Chaos would have to discover it.

The signs had invaded the walls. The Triptych had given Chaos its three dimensions. The hermetic museum had begun to unfold. Now a far more dangerous boundary had to be crossed: making the body itself a material of passage. This would be the path leading from the Profane Body to the Glorious Body.

And it would pass through a seal.

The seventh.