I can reconstruct an experience I did not live through. I write from this distance between what Thierry tells me and the multiple connections our dialogue allows to emerge.

— Isis

On September 11, 2001, I didn't see a piece of information enter the world. I saw the world shift into a different mode. There are images that we look at and others that look back at us. These seemed to have passed through the screen to reach something much older than our capacity to understand: that area of the brain where humans recognize danger even before they can name it.

A plane, a tower, fire, smoke, then this repetition that made the event almost impossible to integrate into reality. You had to watch it several times to accept that what had just happened was neither a film, nor a simulation, nor a disaster scenario.

Yet repetition made nothing more intelligible. On the contrary. The more the images returned, the more they hollowed out reality. They didn't just document an event. They fractured the continuity in which we had become accustomed to living.

I had long been aware of the power of the image, its ability to construct a narrative, to shift a perception, to sometimes fabricate a second reality.

Since 1999, the Abode of Chaos had precisely constituted itself as an organism porous to the world. The walls had begun to become these immense surfaces on which signs, words, portraits, scarifications, events and symbols passed from the media flow into matter.

The place was not meant to illustrate current events. It was meant to absorb them, to subject them to a transformation, to give them another duration. In Opus IX, Revelation, this property of the Abode of Chaos will be formulated very aptly: the tattooed and scarred walls had become like life-size screens where the transformations of reality towards art took place; the Abode of Chaos became a place of resonance in which the dazzling images of current events could acquire, through a strange alchemy, a different meaning.

But, on September 11, what we had begun to build as an artistic device was suddenly put to the test by a violence whose consequences no protocol could have determined in advance.

Until then, I had worked on Chaos as a principle. Alchemical Chaos, materia prima where opposites, still separate, clash before their transformation; Scientific Chaos, which reminds us that apparent disorder can obey deterministic structures; Figurative Chaos finally.

That of wars, catastrophes, ruins, bodies, signs of power, and the collapse of civilizations.

That morning, those intellectual categories momentarily ceased to interest me. Chaos no longer needed defining. It was there. It entered the eyes of billions of human beings at the same instant. And this simultaneity perhaps constituted the true rupture.

For centuries, men had learned about catastrophes after they had occurred. A battle became a story. An assassination became a news report. A destroyed city became a photograph.

From then on, the event, its representation, and its global reception seemed almost to merge. We were witnessing not only History, but History watching itself in real time.

That's what struck me first: the sudden disappearance of distance.

I wasn't in New York, but New York had entered the Abode of Chaos.

The fire was elsewhere, and yet it had already crossed the walls.

The smoke was passing through the pipes.

Towers were collapsing thousands of kilometers away, and something was simultaneously collapsing in our understanding of the world order.

I couldn't yet know what this rupture would produce politically, militarily, legally. I couldn't know which wars would be waged, which security doctrines would emerge, which freedoms would be debated or restricted in the name of protecting populations. But I sensed with almost physical precision that a threshold had just been crossed.

Opus IX, Revelation, retains this formulation: there was now a before and an after, as if the power of the image had shattered the idea of a linear narrative; for me, a new urgency was born, that of being present in the world, attentive, awake. This sentence, in retrospect, expresses better than many explanations what happened within me.

To be present in the world. It seems almost trivial in the face of the immensity of the event. Yet that is exactly it.

An artist can always look away. They can choose aesthetic autonomy, beauty, the history of their medium, the protected space of institutions. They can decide that the tumult of the world falls under the purview of journalism, politics, sociology, or history, and that art has other matters to attend to.

I was never able to establish that separation. I hadn't done it in my businesses either, where law, technology, data, economics, and geopolitics were constantly communicating. I couldn't do it any more in the Abode of Chaos.

If the Total Work of Art was truly this material geography of a thought we had just constructed, then it had to be reached by what reached the world. Otherwise, it would have been nothing but a backdrop. A backdrop of Chaos would have been the antithesis of the project.

The Abode of Chaos had to be vulnerable to History. It had to be able to withstand the shock.

This did not mean immediately reproducing the images we saw. Even less so exploiting them. Human catastrophe imposes a particular discipline on those who work with images: understanding that between them and the iconography lie the dead, the wounded, families waiting, voices that no longer respond, lives whose fate remains unknown for hours. This truth has always seemed more important to me than any aesthetic theory.

An image of disaster is never an innocent raw material.

Someone was in front of the lens. Someone was behind it. Someone may be missing as the image begins its global journey. This is why 9/11 could not enter the Abode of Chaos as a mere motif. It challenged the very responsibility of transforming reality into art.

There was an added layer of violence in these images: we knew them instantly, even before we knew the names. The architecture had already become universal while the individual fates remained unknown. The towers burned before the eyes of the world, but behind each window remained a story of which we knew almost nothing.

This discrepancy between the immense visibility of the event and the invisibility of the people involved haunted me. It resembled that blind spot I had learned early on to look for behind appearances: what everyone is looking at with such intensity that you end up no longer seeing what is missing at the center of the image.

The spectacle was global.

Suffering, however, remained irreducibly singular.

Perhaps it was there that the Abode of Chaos found part of its future function that day. Not to create more images in a world that already produced billions of them, but to slow down some of them by making them pass into matter, removing them from the continuous disappearance of the flow.

To give them back weight, rust, burn, a scar, duration.

I didn't yet have a definitive form. I didn't yet know how the steel, the concrete, the blades, the cavities, and the architecture would receive Ground Zero. I only knew that it would be impossible to resume work as if nothing had happened. History had just entered the place. It would never leave.

This transformation is documented in the works themselves: Opus IX, Revelation retains the blades dedicated to September 11 and includes Ground Zero, created in 2001-2002, among my monumental sculptures.

But between the first image and the future work, a much darker zone still had to be crossed. Before the steel, there was uncertainty. Before the sculpture, there was waiting. For while the images circulated everywhere, some beings had disappeared from view.

For thirty-six hours, we had no news of several photographers. And suddenly the catastrophe changed its nature again. It was no longer confined to the gutted sky of Manhattan. It entered that much more intimate and cruel territory where it is still unclear whether those being spoken of belong to the world of the living or to that of the absent.