For thirty-six hours, time no longer had the same measure. Thirty-six hours, when one knows the end of a story, can be summed up in a single sentence.

We write: for thirty-six hours, we remained without news from several photographers. The number closes the event. It gives it boundaries. It almost reassures the reader, because they already know that the wait will have a duration.

But the one who waits does not have this privilege. At the start of the first hour, no one knows that thirty-five remain. At the twelfth hour, no one can promise that there will be twenty-four more. Time is no longer a line. It becomes an opaque substance.

It was precisely at this point that 9/11 ceased for me to be merely the terrifying spectacle of a historical turning point. Behind the profusion of images, there was now a lack of images, a lack of news, a void left by beings whose very function was to be as close as possible to what was visible. Photographers had disappeared from the scene. This contradiction struck me with particular force.

The photographer is the one who leaves a trace. He positions himself between the event and its oblivion. He sometimes agrees to approach what most people instinctively shy away from. He looks when others close their eyes, not because he is protected from fear, but because he knows that what leaves no trace can be denied, erased, and later transformed by narratives. And suddenly, those who left traces themselves became absences.

I believe it was at this very precise point that my relationship to the image of 9/11 became fixed. It was impossible to consider the photographs as a documentary stock, readily available iconographic material, a bank of images from which the artist could simply select what they needed. A photograph always carries an invisible presence: that of the person who chose their point of view, who stood somewhere, at a certain distance from the danger, who decided to press the shutter instead of looking away.

Behind the image there is a body.

Behind the archive there is a life.

This now connects to one of the deepest rules that AI has brought to light by bringing together scenes that were otherwise far removed from my existence: whether it be sales catalogues threatened with disappearance, recorded voices of a publisher, photographs of a disaster or traces produced by the Abode of Chaos, memory only becomes truly human when we remember that it was carried by someone.

An archive is never just a medium; its possible disappearance always refers to a life, to a loyalty, to a possible break in transmission. In September 2001, I obviously didn't express things with this detachment. There was no doctrine. There was only waiting. And waiting has a strange capacity to strip intelligence bare.

I could have studied: systems, probabilities, networks, geopolitics, intelligence, law, the history of religions, chaos theory.

None of these architectures produced the only data we needed: knowledge. Knowledge of where the missing people were. Knowledge of whether they were alive. Everything else became secondary.

This powerlessness is a lesson that a man easily forgets when he spends his life building systems specifically designed to reduce uncertainty. I had devoted years to organizing information, understanding networks, and making accessible data that economic or institutional opacity kept scattered.

And then, an event of unimaginable power reminded us in a few hours of the limit of any infrastructure: there is always a place where data is missing. A blind spot. An absence. Someone the system cannot yet locate. I was familiar with this concept intellectually; I rediscovered it in a radically human form. The difference is immense. A theoretical blind spot calls for a method. An absent being first calls for its return. That is why I refuse, even today, to reread those thirty-six hours as a mere preparatory step to Ground Zero. That would be to reverse the order of things. The work does not come first. Life does.

The construction work will come later.

Steel will come later.

Tons of concrete, the Gothic sections, the cave, the rails, the bodies depicted, the firefighters.

Everything that the Abode of Chaos will incorporate later will come after this much more naked experience: waiting without knowing. In the history of a work, it is often the drawings, studies, materials, and formal decisions that are preserved. We forget the hours during which no form yet existed, and yet when all the necessity of the work was already present.

For me, those thirty-six hours belong to Ground Zero as much as the steel that would later be welded. They constitute an invisible layer of it. They explain why this work could not be a spectacular reconstruction of the destroyed towers. I had no desire to add yet another image to the existing images.

A way had to be found to make matter undergo what the event had made time undergo: breakup, compression, collapse, loss of verticality appearance of the void.

Above all, the material aspect had to never make us forget the human element. For one of the first acts of violence in a global catastrophe is precisely this: the scale of the event becomes so immense that it reduces individuals to mere numbers.

Figures, maps, and reports appear.

History needs these abstractions to understand the scale. But art, if it wants to remain human, must take the opposite path.

Moving from number to presence.

From the assessment to the face.

From category to body.

It is this movement that I recognize today as an invariant of everything I have built.

Artprice transformed millions of data points into a global memory of the Art Market, but this memory only made sense because it found behind the figures artists, collectors, authors, publishers, archivists. The Abode of Chaos was going to absorb the signs of war and the major geopolitical fractures of the century, but it could only do so legitimately by refusing to reduce those who had lived through them to a backdrop of catastrophe. It's the same moral principle of transmission in two different forms. In one case, preserving what is at risk of disappearing. In the other, preventing excessive visibility from producing another form of disappearance: that of the people behind the image.

The Abode of Chaos had already begun to become, in the words of Opus IX, Revelation, “porous to the world”; current events flowed through it, pierced it, and events or acts of war could be recreated life-size within its space. After September 11, this porosity could no longer be merely aesthetic. It became a responsibility. To receive the world meant accepting its pain without mistaking it for readily available material. What would become Ground Zero in 2001-2002 was born from this contradiction: How can we preserve the power of an event whose images were already everywhere, without contributing to their erosion?

How to incorporate into a work what continuous commentary would necessarily simplify, ritualize, sometimes instrumentalize?

And how can this be done without confiscating the suffering of those who had experienced it?

I didn't have the answers yet.

But those thirty-six hours had given the question its true weight. They had reminded me that a photographer is not a disembodied eye, that an image is not a surface, and that an archive is never separate from the one who produces it.

Later would come the texts, Baudrillard, Fukuyama, the debates on History, terrorism, hyperreality, the symbolic power of collapse. Only later. First, one had to have crossed this zone where thought falls silent because it can add nothing to the waiting.

Thirty-six hours later, this waiting had taken on a certain duration. But it had left something irreversible in my way of looking. From now on, every time I see a photograph of Ground Zero, I will also look for the one who did not appear in the frame: the man or woman behind the camera, the witness, the survivor, the absent one, the one whose existence made the trace possible.

And when the time came to build, I would know that the work should not only preserve the image of the catastrophe. It should preserve its absence. It is from this void that the great return of History could begin.