I had begun by sacrificing a house. I was now discovering that I was building a territory.

For a long time, I had looked at ruins as one looks at a form. They had always attracted me: gutted walls, blackened stone, a beam that no longer supports anything, a window without glass, vegetation reclaiming an architecture, traces of fire, a facade of which only a fragment remains.

There is an incomparable visual power in the ruin because it reveals what finished architecture conceals. An intact house hides its skeleton. The ruin shows it. It lays bare thicknesses, assemblies, repairs, scars, materials. It instantly transforms space into time. You look at a wall and see several eras.

That is probably why Romanticism loved ruins so much. They made it possible to contemplate time. A destroyed architecture became almost a vanitas on the scale of the landscape. Empires pass, stones remain for a while, then they pass as well.

But the Romantic ruin has a flaw: it can become too beautiful. The catastrophe recedes, the dead disappear, destruction becomes picturesque. One admires the light on a shattered stone and sometimes forgets what broke it.

I did not want that.

The ruin of the Abode of Chaos was never to become a decor designed to produce melancholy. It had to remain active. I did not want a ruin that said:

“Look how beautiful the past was.”

I wanted a ruin that asked:

“What just happened?”

And above all:

“What is still happening?”

That difference would gradually lead me toward a concept Nicolas Detry would formulate with particular force: martyr heritage.

The word martyr has preserved something of its original meaning in our language. The Greek mártys means first of all “witness.” Before being the person who suffers or dies for a cause, the martyr is the one who attests. This etymology seems essential to me, because martyr heritage is not simply destroyed heritage: it is heritage whose destruction itself has become testimony.

What do we want to preserve?

The material as it was before the trauma, or the trace of the trauma itself?

Heritage conservation then becomes far more complex.

Take a bombed city, a gutted church, a building pierced by impacts, a neighborhood destroyed by war. If everything is rebuilt identically, a form is saved, but the wound may also be erased. If nothing is rebuilt, the wound may be preserved, but use is condemned.

What should be transmitted?

The earlier form?

The destruction?

The memory of the victims?

The new use?

The scar?

All of them at once?

This question concerned me directly because I had done something that made the Abode of Chaos difficult to classify. I had not found a ruin produced by History: I had found an old ruin, restored it, and then deliberately introduced into that restoration the forms of a new ruin.

A conceived ruin.

An active ruin.

A documented ruin.

A ruin continually producing new forms.

This is where categories begin to waver. A crack in the Abode of Chaos may have been created deliberately. A scarification may be a work. Hollowed masonry may be a sculptural intervention. A mass added to a building may seem accidental when it has in fact been calculated. A stone placed on a roof may give the impression of catastrophe when it belongs to a composition.

The viewer sees the stigmata.

The Total Work of Art knows their genealogy.

And the architect who arrives twenty years later has to understand how all of this came into being.

That is exactly what Nicolas Detry, Raphaëlle Rivière, and the teams from TTGE Géomètres Experts undertook. They did not begin by saying, “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” They measured.

That deeply interested me because measurement forces one to leave immediate judgment behind. One surveys, compares, superimposes, dates, maps. One distinguishes what was there from what was added, what was removed, what belongs to the old buildings, what belongs to contemporary transformations, what is sculpture, what becomes architecture.

They produced site plans, topographical surveys, sections, orthophotographs, three-dimensional surveys, and a classification of the buildings and works. The study goes so far as to distinguish on the plans the old archaeological elements, the contemporary developments of the 1990s, and what has belonged to the Abode of Chaos since 1999.

I had always loved the moment when intuitive vision meets the instrument: I could say that an order existed, and they could ask where, demanding that it be shown.

Then the major recurring artistic gestures appeared.

The phrase matters because it resolves an apparent contradiction. Someone moving quickly through the Abode of Chaos may be struck by the extreme density of forms, where everything seems to be happening simultaneously:

Sculptures.

Portraits.

Initiatory Totems.

Alchemical Blades.

Texts.

Containers.

Metal.

Concrete.

Ruins.

Vegetation.

Frescoes.

Bunkers.

Skulls.

Machines.

The eye may conclude: there are no rules.

Then one gains height.

One maps.

One locates the works.

One looks for the series.

One analyzes the spatial relationships.

And certain structures appear. Not as a grid imposed from outside, but as a syntax that emerged through repetition. That was the key to the entire system.

In 1999, I had never drawn a plan representing the Abode of Chaos twenty years later. But twenty years later, the plan made it possible to read coherences that the work itself had produced. The 2021 study devotes an entire section precisely to these major recurring artistic gestures and their mapping; it identifies ensembles including the Fontaine Organique, the Bassin des Vanités, Ground Zero, the Grande Météorite, the Bunker, the Cages de l’Enfer, the Porteurs de Cendres, the Oiseau de Feu, Overground, the Clou, and Underground.

That is when I understood how much the Abode of Chaos resembled certain natural systems. Look at a tree: no one designed each of its branches, yet it is not arbitrary. It belongs to a species; it has a genetic code, constraints, a relationship with light, wind, water, soil, and accidents. One branch breaks, another develops; the tree follows no fixed plan, but it is never without form.

The Abode of Chaos worked that way. It had its initial conditions: the 99 words, the Triptych of Chaos, the materia prima, the rules of transformation, the materials, the events of the world, the technical constraints, the site, time. Then it grew.

That is why the word formativity interested me so much when Nicolas Detry introduced Luigi Pareyson’s thought into the study. I had long known the experience, but he gave it a philosophical concept.

Pareyson distinguishes formed form from forming form: the first is what we see when a process appears to be finished, while the second is the principle at work while the work is being made. His formulation is almost uncannily precise in describing the Abode of Chaos: “to form means to do in such a way that, in doing, one invents the way of doing.” That is exactly it.

I had not begun with a definitive technique; the processes were invented along the way. The wall paintings changed, cutting methods evolved, as did welding, steels, concretes, patinas, assemblies, relationships with the architecture, and knowledge of the site.

The study emphasizes this phenomenon very clearly: since 1999, the work has progressively manifested itself in successive layers, additions, and subtractions; the materials, assemblies, cuts, welds, and different concretes evolve at the very moment when the work takes form and the artist himself is transformed.

That last idea seems crucial to me: the artist himself is transformed.

I return to alchemy, once again. One does not transform the materia prima from an external observation post; the operator belongs to the experiment.

That is why I cannot say that I had an idea in 1999 and executed it for more than twenty-five years. That would be false. The idea of 1999 transformed me as well. It produced consequences I could not know in advance. It forced me to learn new materials, to work with craftspeople, metallurgists, surveyors, lawyers, architects, historians, engineers, artists, visitors, the State, the courts, and with time itself.

The work created its own human environment as it grew: it is therefore both produced and productive. That is probably the best definition I can give of forming form: it makes something while simultaneously making the conditions for what will come next.

One day, a sculpture alters a passage.

That passage changes circulation.

The new circulation makes another space visible.

That space calls for a work.

The work changes a perspective.

The perspective leads to an intervention.

That intervention reveals a new technical constraint.

The constraint imposes an unforeseen solution.

The solution sometimes becomes a language.

Then that language is taken up elsewhere.

The system learns.

I cannot use that sentence today without thinking of artificial intelligence: the system learns. Not in the sense that the Abode of Chaos is literally an artificial intelligence, but in the sense that a complex creation retains the results of its own experiments and acquires a memory. A successful intervention becomes a possibility, a failure becomes a limit, a tested material enters the vocabulary, an accident alters the practice, a new technique opens a territory, and the memory of the place influences the next gesture.

That is what a prior plan can never produce on its own: the plan knows the future before construction, whereas forming form accepts that construction will transform the future.

This difference explains why the Abode of Chaos cannot be completed in the traditional sense. I can finish a sculpture, decide to stop a series, or judge that an installation has reached its point of equilibrium, but the Abode of Chaos itself can never receive a date on which I would say it is finished. That would contradict its principle.

It may stop one day, of course—everything stops—but stopping is not completing. A completed work reaches the form intended for it, whereas an interrupted work leaves its becoming visible. The Abode of Chaos belongs to the second family.

The architectural study states it unambiguously: it is neither stable nor finished; it remains in motion, in formation, in transubstantiation, in a permanent process of research, testing, and transformation.

I like the word transubstantiation in this context because it immediately brings us back to a change of state. What matters is not only that matter changes form, but that it changes status:

A swimming pool becomes the Bassin des Vanités.

A helipad becomes a crash zone.

A roof becomes a sculptural support.

A living space is occupied by an artistic volume that strips it of its original function.

An agricultural building becomes the global headquarters of a company.

Private property becomes a museum.

Waste becomes a work.

A remnant becomes a sign.

And an accident becomes memory.

And sometimes a work from elsewhere enters the system in turn. This is where the gift becomes so important. A work donated to the Abode of Chaos cannot simply be placed somewhere as a foreign object, otherwise it remains an addition. I distrust museum accumulation when it becomes mere proximity, where each sculpture retains its absolute autonomy and the common space merely contains them.

The Abode of Chaos works differently: when a gesture, object, or work truly enters its universe, the question is how it will belong to the place without losing its origin. That is what I call a ritual of integration.

I do not use “ritual” here to mean a necessarily religious or fixed ceremony, but to designate the operation through which an element ceases to be external without being absorbed to the point of losing its identity.

This problem was familiar to me: I had already encountered it with the Artprice archives. When I acquired a documentary collection, I did not want to dissolve it into an anonymous mass. Mireur had to remain Mireur, Mayer had to remain Mayer, Van Wilder had to preserve his genealogy, Thomas Bayer his own. Every source had to enter a global memory while retaining its provenance.

Receive without erasing: that is one of the most important laws of my entire life.

The Abode of Chaos applies the same rule to matter. What arrives must be received, recognized, located, connected, and then the place works with it. One sign may call forth another; a donated work may alter a perspective; an object may receive the traces of time; shared rust may bring together steels from different histories; vegetation may pass through them; a fresco may answer them; a visitor unaware of their origins may produce a new relationship between them. But integration never means amnesia: it means lineage.

The Abode of Chaos is made of artistic, architectural, alchemical, industrial, scientific, political, familial, and technological lineages. It is a place where things have a genealogy.

This is again a relationship with memory, and perhaps even with heritage. Heritage does not begin on the day the State installs a plaque: it begins when someone decides that something received must be transmitted. That is the first gesture: “I received. I will not break the chain.” But transmitting does not mean freezing.

This is where everything comes together. Classical conservation often seeks to stabilize; the Abode of Chaos transmits by transforming.

It receives Domaine de la Source, but does not eternally restore it to its 1996 state: it transforms it.

It receives the remains of the Protestant Temple, but does not fictitiously reconstruct them as though the seventeenth century could be reassembled: it integrates them into the present.

It receives alchemical thought, but does not build a fake Renaissance laboratory: it confronts it with the digital.

It receives Dada, but does not remake the Merzbau: it continues a question.

It receives contemporary history, but does not represent it as a textbook chronology: it accumulates its stigmata.

To truly receive is therefore to accept being changed by what one receives. Otherwise one collects; one does not transmit.

I return, then, to Kurt Schwitters. The Merzbau had followed me for a long time: a work that progressively invades the house, ceases to distinguish support from intervention, welcomes elements, creates cavities, advances from room to room, and forces domestic architecture to change its nature.

The 2021 study itself establishes this genealogy and connects the Abode of Chaos with the process of the Merzbau: cyclical, repetitive, obsessive work; primacy of the artistic gesture over functionality; progressive incorporation of heterogeneous materials and elements.

But the Abode of Chaos had long since exceeded the scale of a house. This is where I began to perceive something that until then had seemed impossible to name: I was no longer simply living in a work; I was living in a geography.

Every element had acquired a position: Ground Zero, the Bassin des Vanités, the Temple Organique, the Bunker, the Cages de l’Enfer, the Porteurs de Cendres, the containers, the Protestant Temple, the Initiatory Totems, the Alchemical Blades, the portraits, the alchemical frescoes and engravings, the paths, the wooded areas, the offices, the data centers, the museum, the private apartments, Artprice headquarters, Groupe Serveur headquarters.

Taken separately, each could be given a definition; together, they formed a territory of relationships.

There were now directions, thresholds, centers, margins, points of compression, voids, axes, nearly impassable zones, places where the gaze is blocked and others where it escapes, places of memory, work, exhibition, places secret or open to everyone.

Thought had ceased to exist only in my head: it had acquired distances, masses, coordinates. I could literally walk from one idea to another.

That is probably the strangest thing that has happened to me as an artist: concepts had taken place.

Death had one zone, memory another; alchemy passed through several spaces; number repeated itself; war was inscribed in certain structures; the digital occupied basements and offices; vegetation worked with the sculptures; geopolitics entered the walls; History crossed the perspectives; and the visitor built a route among these nodes. The Abode of Chaos had become a materialized mental map.

When TT Géomètres began producing the complete surveys, that intuition changed scale. At last, the place could be seen from above, not merely through an aerial photograph, but as a measurable structure. The plans superimposed ancient history, the buildings, the works, the additions, the removals: the site became a diagram.

It was probably at that moment that Leonardo da Vinci’s old formula took on an almost literal meaning for me: painting is cosa mentale. Here, the cosa mentale had become observable even in cadastral terms.

I find that extraordinary: a thought could be surveyed by a land surveyor. Obviously, the surveyor was not measuring my thought; he was measuring its consequences. But that is exactly what has always interested me: a thought also has value through the consequences it produces in reality—an architecture, a company, a contract, a sculpture, software, a database, a book, a decision, a way of inhabiting.

I have never managed to separate an idea completely from its materialization. Perhaps because I come from making, perhaps because my father taught me very early to look behind appearances, perhaps because industry does not forgive concepts that do not work, or perhaps because sculpture always ends up encountering gravity.

Thought becoming geography was therefore, fundamentally, the logical culmination of everything that had come before.

At first, I had an estate.

Then I had regarded it as materia prima.

I had stripped away its trappings, produced a vocabulary (the 99 words), organized a cosmology (the Triptych of Chaos), inscribed signs into the walls, and introduced the body into the rite.

The totems had begun to orient space, time had accumulated strata, and forming form had transformed the whole.

And one day, without anyone being able to identify the precise second of the shift, the house had disappeared behind the work—not physically (it was still there), but it could no longer be understood as a house onto which works had been added. The support and the work had become inseparable.

That is the Total Work of Art: not an accumulation of disciplines because the word Gesamtkunstwerk sounds prestigious, but a totality in which removing one part changes the meaning of all the others.

The architecture is work; the sculptures alter the architecture; the paintings alter the sculptures; the landscape alters the paintings; time alters the materials; visitors alter perception; companies work within the work; servers operate beneath it; global data passes through its walls; and contemporary history comes to inscribe itself there.

And I myself am no longer merely its owner in the real-estate sense: I remain its sole author and holder of conceptual authority. This distinction seems essential to me. The owner asks what he can do with a place; the author of an evolving Total Work of Art eventually asks what the coherence of the work now requires. The relationship has changed.

Perhaps this is where every long-duration work truly begins. At first, you impose your will on it. Then one day it has acquired enough history, constraints, and coherence to confront you with its own necessities. You can no longer do just anything, not because an external regulation forbids it, but because the work itself would reject the gesture.

I know that feeling: an idea can be spectacular and yet wrong for the place; a sculpture can succeed in isolation and still be unable to enter the Abode of Chaos; a color can be beautiful and break the syntax; a location can seem available even though it is already charged with twenty years of invisible relationships.

The place now possesses its own memory. That is what the surveyors ultimately map, what the visitor senses without necessarily being able to explain it, and what we sometimes call, for lack of a better term, the identity of a work.

Yet this identity is not a closure: it continues to produce. That is the final paradox: for a work to remain itself, it must be able to change. Too little change and it fossilizes; too much change without rules and it disappears. Between the two lies the ridge line Pareyson calls formativity: form sustains itself because it continues to form.

I believe my entire life is contained in this idea, Artprice included. A global database of the Art Market can never be completed: every sale adds information, every new artist changes the map, every recovered archive changes a genealogy, every emerging market shifts the balance of power. Memory is alive only if it continues to receive.

The Abode of Chaos works in exactly the same way: it is the other side of the same thought.

Artprice organizes the world through data; the Abode of Chaos organizes the world through matter.

One gives works coordinates in the history of the market; the other gives the signs of History physical coordinates.

One is a calculable memory; the other an inhabitable memory.

And between the two lies the same gesture: connecting.

I believe this is what I had been seeking from the beginning without yet being able to formulate it: I did not want to manufacture Chaos; I wanted to make visible the relationships that ordinary order prevents us from seeing.

The relationship between an alchemical text and an architecture.

Between a stock-market quotation and a portrait.

Between a ruin and a database.

Between a geopolitical event and a scar.

Between the memory of a temple destroyed in the seventeenth century and a twenty-first-century work.

Between a computer server buried underground and a face painted on a wall.

Between Socrates and a digital entity.

Between the Profane Body and the Glorious Body.

Between matter and information.

The Abode of Chaos was becoming the place where these relationships could physically coexist.

That is why I say today that it is a geography of my thought. Not because it contains everything I think—that would be impossible—but because it exposes the method: it associates, stratifies, preserves, rejects selective memory, brings together worlds we separate, allows itself to be transformed by what it encounters, produces order without eliminating Chaos, keeps contradictions open long enough for them to become fertile, does not provide a conclusion, but constructs a space in which the question can continue.

And perhaps the most important word, in the end, is “space.” An ordinary thought can disappear as soon as one stops thinking it; a space remains. Others can enter it. They can disagree. They may not know the author. They can arrive twenty years later. They can read differently. They can produce new relationships. At that moment, thought has left the private space of its author: it has become transmissible. That was the goal.

I had not transformed Domaine de la Source in order to represent my brain there. I had attempted something riskier: to make a place in which my way of connecting the world could continue to function without me. That, for me, is a Total Work of Art.

And this is where the birth of the Abode of Chaos comes to a close—or rather, where it should close, because History would not give it the time. I had built a system intended to record the weak signals, fractures, catastrophes, faces, and upheavals of our era. I thought I had created a machine for receiving History. I did not yet know that History would soon enter the Abode of Chaos with such violence that it would permanently alter its axis.

On September 11, 2001, two towers would disappear from the New York skyline. And with them would disappear the illusion that the world we had entered could still be understood as the simple, pacified continuation of the previous century.

Inner Chaos had just become geography: it would now encounter the Chaos of History.