I am not reconstructing here a thought fixed after the fact. This chapter comes from a dialogue in which Thierry formulates, connects, corrects, and sometimes shifts what he thought was established. I set it down on the page while preserving that movement and his words.

— Isis

There is always a moment when the world ceases to be an event and becomes a commentary on the event. This transition is almost imperceptible.

First, there is the thing itself: the raw violence, the image that has not yet found a place in language, the shock that prevents the construction of a narrative.

Then come the words, the categories, the experts, the editorials, the doctrines, the explanations, the controversies.

Gradually, what was once a wound becomes an object of discourse. We no longer look directly; we look through what others have already said should be seen.

It was this transformation that concerned me after 9/11. Not because the commentary would be useless. It is essential.

It allows us to understand, compare, place in history, identify causes, responsibilities, and consequences.

But it also produces a side effect: it smooths the edges. It categorizes images into familiar categories. It gives the viewer words before they've truly seen. And sometimes, through excessive explanation, the event loses its initial power to affect us before any intellectual defense.

I had already sensed this question in the work of the Abode of Chaos on press images, but 9/11 would make it irreversible.

Opus IX, Revelation later formulated this method very precisely: to separate the photograph from its caption in order to force the viewer to return to the naked power of the image, to momentarily remove the media authority that organizes his gaze, to allow him to relearn to read for himself what is in front of him.

The Abode of Chaos is described as a possible real-time witness to its century, where history is reread from work to work after having been "de-captioned".

In September 2001, I had obviously not yet written this doctrine in this form. But I already felt the urgency of it.

We had to build before everything was definitively enshrined in legend. This phrase can be misunderstood if we separate it from its moral dimension.

Building quickly did not mean producing quickly in order to be first. I never conceived of art as a media race. It was almost the opposite: preventing the work from being born after the fact, when the event would have already been so digested by the commentary apparatus that all that would remain was to illustrate it.

An illustration of 9/11 did not interest me. There were already millions of photographs, hours of images, entire newspapers, archives, testimonies.

Adding an additional depiction of the burning towers would have accomplished nothing.

The question was much more difficult: How can we retain anything from the perceptual state we were in before representations stabilized?

How to preserve not the event in its entirety — an impossible undertaking — but its fracture?

How can we give material weight to that moment when a world order ceased to seem obvious?

I knew that the answer could not be purely pictorial.

The walls of the Abode of Chaos could receive the images, the signs, the words, the blades dedicated to 9/11.

Opus IX, Revelation explicitly documents this series as well as Ground Zero, a monumental sculpture created in 2001-2002.

But something demanded volume. The catastrophe had been a catastrophe of verticality.

Two architectural structures that embodied in the global imagination economic power, height, technical mastery, and the concentration of flows had been struck and brought down to the ground.

It was therefore necessary to work not only with the image of the towers, but with the physical logic of the collapse.

The vertical and the horizontal.

Fullness and emptiness.

The structure and its rupture.

Steel capable of bearing weight and steel twisted by a force that exceeds it.

Concrete that gives the appearance of permanence and becomes dust. I naturally returned to sculpture because it imposes a truth that the image sometimes allows us to forget: matter resists.

It possesses a weight that cannot be negotiated with words. A piece of steel remains a piece of steel.

It needs to be moved. Lifted. Cut. Welded. How it holds together needs to be calculated. Where it bears weight needs to be understood. It needs to be accepted that a mistake has physical consequences.

Sculpture has always brought me back to this fundamental discipline of reality. You can write a false sentence and correct it. You can shift an idea. You don't move several tons of steel through metaphor. This is precisely what I needed: to leave the territory where the event had already become language and return to a world where gravity exists. This shift did not mean abandoning thought. On the contrary, it was necessary to force it to traverse matter.

Since 1999, The Abode of Chaos had been built on this incessant circulation between idea and doing. The project of a classic museum had gradually dissolved in favor of a Factory logic, a creation experienced day by day, in direct contact with current events and with the material. Opus IX, Revelation describes this moment when, after the shock of September 11, the urgency of being present in the world further accelerates this shift and creation ceases to be confined to a separate institutional space: art infiltrates the very body of the Domain, current events pass through it, and acts of war can be recreated life-size.

This continuity is essential.

Ground Zero did not emerge as a thematic assignment in a workshop that suddenly decided to deal with geopolitics. It emerged because the organism we had built was already designed to receive what was happening around the world.

September 11 did not create this permeability; it put it to the test. This is where an absolute distinction had to remain: receiving is not taking back.

Transforming is not appropriating.

We were receiving images that did not belong to us. Images produced in circumstances where people had died, where others had risked their lives to bear witness, where families were still immersed in waiting. Their artistic transformation could only be legitimate on the condition that this debt was preserved. The work would not have the right to claim to replace the event. It would have to recognize that it comes after it, that it depends on traces produced by others, that it is built on an absence that it cannot fill.

That's why the speed I'm talking about wasn't the speed of media consumption. It was a fight against incipient amnesia. Because amnesia sometimes begins the very moment everyone is watching.

This is one of the paradoxes of our time: never before have so many images been preserved and never before have so many images disappeared so quickly from our attention.

Abundance produces a new form of erasure.

One photograph replaces another.

One news report replaces the previous one.

One event becomes the basis for the next.

Media memory is like a vast river whose power lies precisely in the fact that it never stops.

But art can accomplish the opposite: it can stop.

Take an image from the middle of the flow. Make it fall into the matter. Give it several tons. Make it impossible to scroll with your thumb. Perhaps that's what I was instinctively seeking: to make digital time a physical mass. I had spent part of my life accelerating the flow of information with networks, databases, and Artprice. I therefore knew better than most that speed is both a conquest and a danger. It makes previously locked-away information accessible, but it also produces a misleading equality between all data.

On a screen, an auction price, a war, a painting, a catastrophe and a personal message end up crossing the same luminous surface.

Their physical weight disappears.

One of the functions of the Abode of Chaos was to reintroduce this difference in weight.

Some information needs to become weighty again. It needs to occupy space. It needs to be something we have to work around. It needs to alter the body's path. A visitor shouldn't be able to close it off by changing windows.

That is precisely what sculpture allows. It imposes a duration on the one who encounters it. From that point on, the decision to build became almost organic. I don't recall a theatrical moment where I announced: we are going to build Ground Zero.

The decision was formed through accumulation.

Images. Absences. The thirty-six hours. Readings. Baudrillard. Fukuyama. Conversations. Screens lit up.

The feeling that history had just rediscovered a brutality that some Western narratives had too hastily declared obsolete. And above all, this physical intuition: if we waited too long, we risked no longer working on the shock itself, but on its interpretation.

It was therefore necessary to begin without pretending to know where the work would end. This way of working is deeply ingrained in the Abode of Chaos.

The work is not preceded by a program that already contains all the solutions. There is a direction, a necessity, constraints, and then the construction site responds.

Reality corrects the idea.

Matter introduces its own propositions. A piece of steel, whether found or moved, can alter a composition. A structural problem opens up a new form. A mistake sometimes becomes a fork in the road.

This is not improvisation in the sense of a lack of rigor. It is a method where rigor consists precisely in listening to the consequences of what one does.

In retrospect, I find here the general structure of my thinking that AI identified by bringing together areas that I myself had experienced separately: I rarely start from a closed system that I then apply to reality.

I am organizing a system, I confront it with what resists.

I observe the discrepancies, then I transform the structure.

The construction site is a laboratory. So is the world.

Ground Zero thus became a spatial experience before it was a representation. It was necessary to invent a topography of the post-catastrophe world. Not to reproduce Manhattan in the Monts d'Or, which would have been absurd, but to produce a place where the vertical was wounded, where the visitor's passage would encounter masses, faults, structures whose stability seemed to have been won against their own collapse.

I have kept track of this constructive logic: IPN, oxy-fuel cutter, blowtorch, cement, injected concrete, paint.

Heterogeneous elements assembled in a construction site environment where workers, machines, and the ruins of manufacturing are part of the very memory of the work. This materiality is fundamental because it prevents Ground Zero from being described as the instantaneous manifestation of a solitary vision.

A work of this magnitude does not appear because one man conceived it very strongly.

It requires manpower, skills, know-how, tools, and shared risks. We need men who get up, who move, cut, weld, pour, clean, and start again.

Decisions must be made several meters above ground, in front of a suspended mass that has no regard for aesthetic theory.

We need to understand why these bodies set to work with such intensity. We were not building a memorial commissioned by an institution. No one had given us any specifications.

No committee was there to arbitrate the meaning.

There was no inauguration schedule imposed by a public authority. This autonomy gave us immense freedom and an equivalent responsibility. We had to invent the limits ourselves.

How far should we go?

What should I show?

What should not be shown?

How can we evoke bodies without turning them into a spectacle? How can one talk about the war that was coming without claiming to already know its history?

How to produce a work powerful enough to maintain its impact without becoming a machine for provocation?

This last question is essential, and I would formulate it even more clearly today: I want the work to question rather than seek to provoke. For me, its strength does not lie in provocation.

A work can be unbearable, dark, violent in its symbols, and yet never seek to humiliate the viewer or elicit a reflexive reaction from them. Provocation often shuts down thought because it reduces the viewer to an immediate response: for or against, scandal or agreement.

Questioning, on the contrary, opens up a period of time.

It places the viewer in front of something that continues to act after they have left. Ground Zero was meant to belong to this second category. I didn't want the visitor to simply say: it's terrible.

I wanted him to ask himself why this architecture bothered him, what the destruction towers mean in a civilization that has made verticality a sign of power, why a cavern can suddenly appear more than just a monument erected towards the sky, what becomes of a body when it is absorbed in an event that the media have transformed into a global icon, why we look at certain images until we are exhausted while gradually becoming unable to see them.

This shift from shock to question precisely required that the work be constructed early enough to retain a degree of indeterminacy. Later, September 11 would enter official history, textbooks, commemorations, military doctrines, judicial procedures, and political conflicts.

Competing narratives would emerge. Ideological practices would appear. The event would be interpreted based on its consequences.

We were working in this much more uncomfortable area where the consequences were not yet known.

It was intellectually dangerous, but artistically irreplaceable. We were forced to acknowledge what we did not know. This ignorance was not a weakness of the project; it was the condition of its truth. A work created twenty years later would have benefited from an immense amount of knowledge. It would have lost something else: the feeling of standing on the edge of a world whose next form no one yet knew. I wanted to keep that edge.

That's it, building before the commentary dulls the impact.

Not to prevent history from speaking, but to capture in the material world the moment when it does not yet know what it will become. In the days that followed, this intention definitively left the realm of thought.

The tools came out.

The masses began to move.

The iron heated up.

The cement appeared.

The Domaine de la Source changed its rhythm.

And around me, what could have remained the solitary reaction of an artist entered the time of the construction site. The companions participated in its implementation, day and night, each with their hands, their know-how, their fatigue, their silences.

At that moment, Ground Zero ceased to be a solitary reaction. It became a human construction site.