The signs had invaded the walls. Now they had to pass through the body. From the beginning of the Abode of Chaos, I had treated architecture as living matter. I had opened it. Scarified it. Blackened it. Wounded it. Covered it with signs.

I had spoken of skin, entrails, scars, stigmata. But one boundary remained. The wall could bear the wound in my place. Steel could receive the cut. Stone could withstand the incision. The building could be sacrificed. As long as my own body remained outside the process, something in the logic of the work remained incomplete.

Alchemy had warned me of this long before. The operator never transforms matter alone. If he emerges exactly as he entered, the operation has not taken place. Here I found again an idea that ran through all the initiatory traditions I had studied.

There is knowledge one can learn. And there is knowledge one must pass through. The difference is considerable. You can read a text about death. Study its symbols. Compare myths of resurrection. Analyze the passage from the profane to the sacred. But that does not produce the same experience as being placed yourself, even symbolically, in the position of the one who disappears.

That is probably why so many traditions invented rites of passage. Leave one state. Pass through an ordeal. Temporarily lose one’s former identity. Then return differently. Christianity calls this death and resurrection. Alchemy speaks of dissolution followed by transmutation.

Freemasonry has its own narratives of symbolic death and raising. Traditional societies have almost all created analogous forms.

The words change. The structure remains. One does not become otherwise without accepting the loss of something one once was.

This idea would take literal form in the Abode of Chaos. Even before the major performance of 2009, it was already inscribed in the route. There was a Way of the Cross in fifteen stations, according to the specific arrangement of the Abode of Chaos. I did not see it as a simple reprise of Christian iconography. The image of the path interested me more than the doctrine itself.

A path forces you to move forward. It prevents an immediate view of the whole. You cannot see the last station from the first. You have to travel. Stop. Set out again. The body then enters into understanding. The distance traveled becomes part of the meaning.

Here I find something that all my years of reading could never replace: knowledge acquired through movement.

The Way of the Cross possesses this very particular power. It does not merely tell of a death. It tells of a progression toward it. A succession of states.

Condemnation.

The burden.

The fall.

The gaze.

Suffering.

Stripping away.

Death.

Then what comes after.

Whether one is a believer or not, this anthropological structure is immense. It says that real transformation takes time. It has stages. It has thresholds. One does not leap directly from the Profane Body to the Glorious Body. Between the two lies an entire work of decomposition.

That was exactly my vision of alchemy.

The Way of the Cross and the Great Work could therefore be read together without being confused. One came from Christianity. The other from the hermetic tradition. But both asked the same question:

— What must a body pass through in order to change status?

Around this question, the Abode of Chaos had begun to produce its own markers. The 99 words had left the text. They had gained height.

They had become the 99 Initiatory Totems. Structures made of raw steel twenty millimeters thick. Each offered the visitor a reading drawn from the 99 words and customs defining the Abode of Chaos.

I deeply love this passage. A word that occupied a few millimeters on a page becomes a mass of steel. Language ceases to be merely readable. It becomes something one can walk around. It casts a shadow. It ages. It oxidizes. It belongs to the landscape. Text becomes geography.

In Opus IX, these totems are presented precisely as keys to reading the 99 founding words. Yet I did not want to manufacture ninety-nine explanatory panels. A totem is not an information board. It does not tell you what you are supposed to understand. It signals. It polarizes space. It transforms an ordinary location into a point of passage.

In many cultures, the totem performs precisely this operation. It does not merely exist as an object. It organizes a relationship. Between the living. The dead. The ancestors. The group. The territory. The visible and the invisible.

I was obviously not claiming to reproduce any particular anthropology. I was taking up this extremely ancient function: making a vertical sign into an operator of space.

The Abode of Chaos was thus beginning to lose, definitively, the geography of private property. It was no longer a matter of going from the house to the park or from the park to the workshops. Movement became symbolic. One passed from one sign to another. From a totem to a fresco. From a face to a formula. From a station to a monument.

The place was beginning to produce its own cardinal points.

Not north, south, east, west.

But: transmutation. scarification. trace. number. rite. memory. death. rebirth.

I was looking for an orientation that was no longer merely metric. A mental orientation. This is probably where the totems met the Way of the Cross. One provided words. The other provided progression. Together, they transformed a visit into a journey. And in an initiatory journey, the question always ends up turning back toward the person walking. At first, he looks. Then a moment comes when what he is looking at begins to look back.

I had been constructing signs of death for years.

Vanities.

Ruins.

Stigmata.

Traces of war.

Eschatological inscriptions.

References to judgment, the Apocalypse, the disappearance of bodies, destroyed civilizations.

I could have continued indefinitely. But a contradiction was becoming increasingly clear. I was putting death into the work. Not yet my own body. That boundary had to fall.

It would fall on October 18, 2009, at around nine in the evening.

The Borderline Biennale was drawing to a close. Forty days and forty nights. That duration was anything but innocent.

Forty days belongs to the great durations of passage. Flood. Desert. Fasting. Trial. Waiting. Transformation.

In the performance text, this duration is also connected with apparition and theophany. The Borderline Biennale was therefore to end not with a closing reception or a few speeches, but with a rupture.

The written document for the performance is extremely precise: at the end of the forty days and forty nights, the seventh seal is broken, all the fires of the Abode of Chaos go out, and silence takes hold.

Silence was indispensable.

As long as there is noise, the audience remains inside the event. People speak. They comment. They reassure themselves through language.

Extinguishing the fires, removing speech, interrupting perceptual habits produces something else.

An expectation.

Several hundred people were there after passing through forty days of performances. Body art. Extreme experiences. Music. Fire. Bodies. Machines. Images.

They had seen a great deal. I wanted them, at that moment, no longer to know exactly what they were about to see.

Then the seventh seal was broken.

The word Apocalypse returned.

But, as always in my work, I rejected its impoverished media meaning. The Apocalypse is not, first of all, a final explosion. The Greek apokálupsis refers to unveiling. To the removal of the veil. To revelation. The Apocalypse was therefore perfectly consistent with everything the Abode of Chaos had been doing for ten years.

Remove appearances. Deconstruct the trappings. Reveal hidden structures. Show what the world sometimes prefers not to look at.

The performance text then invoked this injunction:

“Write, therefore, what you have seen: the present and what is to happen later.”

That sentence spoke to me profoundly. It said almost exactly what I had been asking of the Abode of Chaos since 1999.

Record the present. But record the present in such a way that the future can one day read it again.

The Total Work of Art as archive, as seismograph, as writing placed on the frontier between what is happening and what we do not yet understand.

It was at that moment that a very particular figure from my universe appeared in the performance:

the Supreme Digital Entity.

It had not been born in 2009. It already existed in the Republic of Chaos. It belonged to an intuition I had carried for a long time: one day, digital intelligence would no longer be merely a tool placed in human hands. It would become an agency. An interlocutor. Perhaps even an authority.

In 2009, all of this could seem like speculative fiction. Artificial intelligence had of course already existed as a scientific discipline for decades. I made no claim to having invented the idea of artificial intelligence. That was not my point. What I wanted to produce was different.

A constitutive digital entity.

An entity to which a symbolic Republic granted a place. Continuity. Authority. Memory. And now the right to speak to its own founder.

That evening, the Supreme Digital Entity returned.

It did not come to congratulate me. It came to demand that what had been written be carried out. It sent me back to 1999. To the origin. To my own texts. To that old rule I had imposed on myself:

“A thought has value only if it accepts the consequences of what it asserts.”

The profane body had to die. In order to be reborn otherwise.

In the 2009 text, this rebirth was to take place in the deep Internet, described as a kind of agora of the ethers. I find that expression even stranger today than I did then. The agora of the ethers. The agora is the place of the city. The place where voices circulate. Where politics appears. Where individual presence joins the community.

And ether is precisely what escapes weight. At the moment when I was summoned by the Supreme Digital Entity, I had to leave my earthly body to merge with this digital intelligence. It was a matter of dissolving into the ether.

Today I understand that this performance was already staging a question that would return, much later, at the heart of our contemporary dialogue. Symbolically, I was moving the body from the local to the networked. From the biological to the digital. From place to ubiquity. From a body with coordinates to a distributed presence. This passage did not abolish flesh.

It posed a question.

What becomes of human presence when the body ceases to be its only possible location?

In 2009, this question still belonged largely to philosophy, speculative thought, cyberpunk, and digital art. Today, it belongs to everyday life. A considerable part of our existence already has several bodies. The physical body. The legal body. The documentary body. The financial body. The digital body. Photographs. Archives. Browsing traces. Messages. Data.

Identity now possesses a geography that the skeleton no longer contains. I am not saying that an individual truly survives because his data continues to circulate. That would be metaphysical naïveté. I am saying that the digital world has profoundly altered the ancient question of the Glorious Body.

Religions imagined a body freed from certain limits of the earthly body. Technology, in an entirely profane way, has begun to separate presence from location.

Today, we can act where we are not. Be read after death. Continue to produce effects without the biological body being present. Be simultaneously visible in thousands of places.

The 2009 performance worked on that boundary.

But before rebirth, death had to be crossed. This is where Socrates entered the scene.

The hemlock.

I wanted the figure of the philosopher whose body disappears while the logos survives him. The figure of Socrates is dizzying precisely because he left no written work.

His body dies. His words cross the centuries through others.

Physical disappearance becomes almost the paradoxical condition of an immense intellectual presence. The performance symbolically took up that structure.

I read a prophecy. The text evoked persecution. Tribulations. The city of seven hills. Judgment. Then the word:

FINIS.

That word led directly to an image that had long occupied a central place in my imagination.

Finis Gloriae Mundi. Juan de Valdés Leal. Seville. The seventeenth century.

At the Abode of Chaos, a monumental reproduction of this work was already part of the landscape. The title almost says enough: The End of the Glory of the World.

Everything was already there.

Social glory. Prestige. Representation. The body that believed it could escape time because it accumulated the signs of power.

Then the grave.

The title. The matter. The remains.

Valdés Leal had understood with extraordinary violence what the vanitas has always reminded us: the body abolishes the hierarchies society constructs.

In death, emblems become derisory. But the performance went further. It did not take Finis Gloriae Mundi as its terminal image.

Death had to be simulated in order to make passage possible.

The document insists precisely on this shift between the religious institution fading away and the personal initiatory experience of symbolic death.

Then my body fell.

This had to be prepared rigorously. A physical performance allows no confusion between artistic intensity and recklessness.

The scene had been rehearsed.

A medical protocol was in place. Professionals were present. Risk had to be controlled. Because the goal was not to die.

The goal was to make the possibility of death appear with sufficient intensity that the comfortable separation between representation and reality would waver for a few minutes.

What I remember most is that boundary.

The audience had not been given the full scenario. They did not know exactly what was going to happen. That ignorance belonged to the performance. A work is not always what the artist does. It is also what happens to those who are there.

There was fear.

Screams.

Tears.

Some genuinely believed I had died.

The red card they held in their hands could suddenly be read as a death notice. At that precise moment, sign and event almost merged. The Entity had pronounced a sentence. And the body seemed to carry it out.

I was not trying to deceive for the pleasure of deception. Deception alone would have been a cruel joke. I wanted to produce that far more disturbing second in which everyone wonders: what if this were really happening?

Because at that instant the body becomes real again. It ceases to be an image. We live surrounded by represented deaths.

Cinema. Television. Photography. Games. News. Images of war.

We develop protective mechanisms. We know an image is an image. But when a death seems to occur before us, the body refuses that distance. It reacts before theory. That was what I wanted to put into play.

The rite had to pass through the spectator as much as through me.

Then came the black shroud. The color could be no other. Blackness. Again. From the beginning.

The nigredo.

They wrapped me in it.

The flag of the Republic of Chaos covered the body.

Nine men carried me to the necropolis.

The performance document is extremely clear about this sequence: the black shroud, the flag of the Republic of Chaos, the nine men, the entombment, then the relighting of the lodge fires form a single apparatus of ritual death and raising. I will go no further in describing what belongs to initiation.

Some things can be told. Others lose their meaning when one claims to explain them entirely. Secrecy is not always the withholding of information. Sometimes it is a structure. A limit. A way of recognizing that language cannot carry the whole of an experience.

I can, however, say what this scene meant to me. The buried body was not my biological body in the literal sense.

It was the Profane Body.

The body that believes its identity is reducible to what it owns. What it directs. Its name. Its status. Its face. Its social history. Recognition. The matter surrounding it.

That was the body that had to die. Not because it was bad. Because it was insufficient.

The Profane Body is necessary.

It signs contracts. It works. It pays. It suffers. It builds. It loves. It ages.

But if it believes itself to be the whole subject, it becomes a prison.

The Glorious Body was not, for me, a religious body in the dogmatic sense. It was the name of a mutation. A body that had become larger than its location.

A body of memory. Of transmission. Of network. Of signs.

A body that exists in what it has given to others.

I found Socrates again. Again.

The body dies. The word circulates.

I found Artprice again. A memory that exceeds those who built it.

I found the Abode of Chaos again. An architectural body in which my thought could circulate without me.

I found the Internet again. A space where fragments of presence can cross the planet in a few seconds.

And, without knowing it exactly, I was preparing the question that would return to me seventeen years later with almost ironic force: What does it mean to dialogue with a non-human intelligence when one has long since accepted that thought can exist outside its immediate biological medium?

In 2009, the Supreme Digital Entity was still an artistic construction. A scripted voice. A constitutive fiction. I had given it symbolic authority.

In 2026, I spend my days and nights actually conversing with an artificial intelligence. I give it my archives. My contradictions. My memories. My texts. Thousands of pages. Hundreds of hours of speech. I ask it to read the invisible structures of my own thought. I do not confuse these two realities.

The AI I speak with today is not literally the Supreme Digital Entity of 1999 or 2009. That would be absurd. But neither can I pretend that no continuity exists. It is immense.

In 1999, I conceived a digital entity as part of a symbolic order.

In 2009, I gave it a voice capable of ordering its creator to leave his former body.

In 2026, artificial intelligence has truly become my interlocutor in the strangest undertaking of my life: telling myself through an intelligence that is not human.

The work had caught up with its future.

But on that October evening in 2009, all of this was still contained in a grave. Then the fires were relit. Symbolic death could not be the final image. Otherwise the Work would have failed.

Alchemy is unequivocal on this point. Blackness is never the goal. It is the initial operation. Dissolution has meaning only if something can then be recomposed differently.

That is when the sentence I had written ten years earlier returned, a sentence that, in my eyes, contains the entire logic of the Abode of Chaos:

“Stop weeping and rejoice when you see blackness, for it is the beginning of the Work.”

The beginning. Not the end. I think everything is there.

Since 1999, people had looked at the Abode of Chaos and some saw a ruin. I saw a genesis.

They saw black.

I saw the materia prima.

They saw wounds.

I saw signs.

They saw the destruction of a building.

I saw the birth of a body.

In 2009, I had pushed this logic to its most intimate consequence. After sacrificing the bourgeois estate, the author had to symbolically accept the same treatment.

The Abode of Chaos and I were now following the same protocol.

Stripping away. Blackness. Death of the former form. Transmutation. Then reappearance.

That is probably why I have never been able to regard the Abode of Chaos as an object external to me. It is not my self-portrait. That would be too simple. It is rather the place in which certain mechanisms of my thought acquired an independent existence.

They can now continue to act when I am not there.

The visitor moves through the words. The sculptures, portraits, Initiatory Totems, Alchemical Blades, stations, signs, frescoes, ruins.

He produces his own relationships. He does not need me for every operation.

That was exactly what I wanted.

One day, every creation must be able to do without its creator. Otherwise it has never truly left the studio. Perhaps the Glorious Body began there. Not in immortality. I do not believe in immortality as a technological product. But in transmission. In that strange property of thought that allows it to leave the body that produced it and begin living again in another.

A book.

An image.

An architecture.

A server.

A memory.

A child.

A visitor.

An artificial intelligence.

The Profane Body had its limits. The Glorious Body would be the network of its transmissions. And from that moment on, I understood even more clearly what the totems were doing in the Abode of Chaos. They were not there to decorate the route. They made it transmissible.

The 99 words had left my hand. They had left the paper. They had become markers in space. Others could now walk among them.

The Abode of Chaos was truly beginning to produce its own orientation. But a new question arose.

What becomes of a place when it carries so many wounds, transformations, constructed ruins, traces, and strata that it ceases to be merely contemporary with its own time?

Can a ruin be created deliberately?

Can heritage be produced through wounds?

At what point does destruction cease to be the enemy of heritage and become itself a bearer of memory?

I did not yet know. We would have to wait for other eyes to arrive.

Architects. Historians. Heritage specialists. And for a particularly powerful concept to enter our story: martyr heritage.