From the moment the decision was made, Ground Zero ceased to be an idea. It became a community of bodies at work.

This is an essential distinction, because the memory of a monumental work almost always ends up erasing those who made it materially possible.

We remember an author, a title, a date, a few photographs, sometimes a weight or dimensions; we forget the men who carried, held, cut, welded, moved, boxed, poured, waited for matter to set, started again when a piece refused the position that had been assigned to it.

Yet, when I think back to Ground Zero, it's not a finished form that comes to mind first. It's a construction site: companions, days that spilled into the nights, tools everywhere, metal, concrete, machines.

These actions had to be coordinated because some of the structures allowed for no mistakes. And there was this very particular feeling that, for a time, the entire Abode of Chaos breathed in rhythm with what we were building.

I say "we" because the project required a wide range of expertise. The design and decision-making remained my responsibility; their implementation demanded skills that I did not claim to possess alone.

The word companion here has its oldest meaning. One who shares the work, the time, the risk, the know-how and sometimes the exhaustion.

I did not want a relationship where the artist would give orders from a protected distance while others executed a sculpture designed on paper.

That wasn't my way of working.

I was on the construction site with them, facing the same physical resistances, the same program changes imposed by reality.

The subject matter does not recognize any status.

A mass of steel is not lighter simply because the person standing before it is the creator of the work. A weld does not become correct because a conceptual intention accompanies it. A structure does not hold together by artistic authority.

You have to understand, calculate, observe, try, sometimes take apart, start again.

It is this equality before the material that gives the construction site its truth.

The Abode of Chaos had already been built within that culture: a work in permanent transformation, in which technicians, companions, relatives and family could come together around a problem that very quickly ceased to be abstract.

Ground Zero was going to push this logic much further.

The sheer size of the crowds and the inner urgency that drove us altered the intensity of the work. It was not a matter of chaotic haste.

On the contrary, the greater the symbolic weight of what we undertook, the more precise the actions had to be.

I have always been wary of this romanticized view of Chaos that makes a virtue of confusion. The apparent disorder of the Abode of Chaos has never signified an absence of order. It stems from a semiological and spatial organization, a composition whose lines may be complex but are not left to chance.

The construction site provided the most concrete demonstration of this every day. To produce a form that can give the viewer a feeling of collapse, fracture, and catastrophe, it is paradoxically necessary to build with great rigor.

The ruin depicted must hold.

The perceived imbalance must be achieved through a structure whose actual stability is controlled.

This paradox sums up almost the entire Abode of Chaos: it takes a great deal of order to give Chaos a proper form.

The presence of the fellow companions also brought a plurality of perspectives to the project. I knew what I was looking for overall, but each person encountered the work through their own unique approach. One saw a problem with the cut, another a mass to be moved, yet another a connection, a reworking, a surface, an access point. While I was simultaneously thinking about 9/11, about the destroyed verticality, the cavern, the history of images, and the geopolitical future of the world, someone simply had to answer a question of admirable brutality:

How do we fit this here?

This question fascinates me because it protects art from its own verbal inflation. One can attribute to a piece any meaning one wants; if it doesn't hold together, it collapses. This self-evident truth doesn't diminish thought. It purifies it. It reminds it that at a precise moment it must pass the test of reality.

This is one of the reasons why I have always enjoyed working with people who have a deep connection to their materials. Manual skill contains an intelligence that the intellectual world often underestimates.

Watching a companion approach a difficulty, touch a piece, assess almost immediately the possible reaction, know from experience which gesture will be effective and which will be useless, is to witness a form of thought that does not need to present itself as such.

As a child in Romagnieu, I learned that reality has this kind of school: that of tools, animals, the earth, mechanisms, and common sense which never opposes intelligence but reminds it of its obligations.

Decades later, Ground Zero brought me back to the same principle, albeit on a different scale. Intuition was necessary; it never replaced competence. The work progressed in this way, through a constant interplay between the overall vision and local issues. A monumental sculpture is not a large sculpture in the sense of simply multiplying the dimensions of a small object.

Beyond a certain scale, the very nature of the problem changes.

Mass transforms relationships between people. It forces anticipation. It imposes sequences. It creates its own deadlines. It alters the flow of traffic around it even before the work is finished. It already begins to produce space.

This is what was happening at the Abode of Chaos: Ground Zero wasn't even finished yet, but it was already changing the way we moved through the place.

The construction site created temporary territories, opened and closed passages, forced people to bypass certain areas, concentrated men and tools in certain places, and then abruptly shifted the center of gravity of the work.

The artwork thus began by acting on those who created it before acting on those who would view it. This idea seems important to me because it reverses the usual chronology of an exhibition.

In a museum, a work is often completed elsewhere and then installed for the public. Here, the space itself was the studio, the materials, the environment, and soon, the reception area. There was no clear boundary between producing and exhibiting, between construction site and artwork, between architecture and sculpture. This continuity also explains the intensity of the days and nights.

We didn't truly leave the workshop only to return the next day to a neutral space. We lived in close contact with what we were transforming. The work site remained present even when a tool stopped. A mass moved during the day still altered the landscape by nightfall. A decision made late could change what needed to be done the very next day. There was a mental continuity that was difficult to break.

When I talk about the three or four hours of sleep that might have been enough during certain phases of work, I'm not trying to create a mythology of exhaustion. Lack of sleep isn't an aesthetic value, and fatigue guarantees nothing. It was simply part of that period of extreme concentration when the line between the workday and the rest of life became extraordinarily thin.

Everything was absorbed: conversations, meals eaten amidst the construction site, decisions that continued to be discussed even though the physical work had ceased. The images of 9/11 remained present, while news from around the world continued to arrive.

This superimposition constituted a unique experience: we were constructing a work based on an event whose history was continuing in real time. Ground Zero did not yet belong to the past.

Afghanistan was about to enter the war.

Governments were redefining their security doctrines.

The newspapers published new information every day.

Responsibilities were being analyzed, networks were being reconstructed, and the stories were already beginning to diverge.

And there we were, in the Monts d’Or, with steel, concrete and machines, trying not to anticipate these explanations but to preserve in matter something of this fundamental instability.

This contemporary nature explains why the construction site could not be experienced as a simple manufacturing process. Every day, the very meaning of what we were doing could be shifted by new information.

This is a formidable problem for an artist.

Normally, the time frame of the work allows one to observe the event from a distance. Here, distance did not exist. I therefore had to resist two opposing temptations: to fix an interpretation too quickly, or to wait so long that only the dominant interpretation would remain.

It was during this interval that expertise became truly important. The construction site prevents you from remaining isolated with your own way of thinking. A decision has visible consequences for everyone. It must be understood in order to be implemented. It immediately encounters the objections of reality.

This confrontation with the construction site acts as a form of control. It is not an aesthetic vote; the author retains responsibility. But the interaction with others forces intuition to become intelligible in the form of action.

"There", "higher", "not like that", "we have to start again", "it has to go behind", "this mass must remain perceptible": the language of the construction site suddenly reduces complex intellectual constructions to spatial decisions.

And I like this reduction because it reveals what, in a thought, can truly become form.

Nadège was there for this adventure, as she had been since the birth of the Abode of Chaos and long before that in our collaborative work. It would be profoundly wrong to portray this period as one of a man absorbed in creation while his family observed from the outside.

The Abode of Chaos has always been committed to the family.

It entered our lives because it was our place, our work, our environment, our story in the making. Nadège knew my ability to simultaneously generate hypotheses, connections, and decisions. She also knew that such an expansive vision can only become reality if someone maintains continuity, brings order to the sequences, and preserves the link between people and necessities.

This complementarity permeated everything we had already undertaken together and was naturally reflected on the construction site.

Again, I don't want to retrospectively invent perfect dialogues or distribute roles according to an overly convenient dramatic structure. The reality was more organic.

We were in it. We had to act, move forward, solve the problem.

And Sydney was growing up amidst all of this. His presence introduced a dimension into the construction site whose full significance I probably didn't yet grasp. For an adult, Ground Zero evoked an immediately identifiable historical catastrophe. For a teenager, perception came first through the things themselves: the masses, the noises, the men working, the concrete, the emerging shapes, the adults' exhaustion, the extraordinary daily transformation of their home.

He could see his father, his mother, and the companions involved in this construction.

History thus entered his life not only through television but also through physical objects. This point deserves its own chapter, because it touches on lineage and how a work can become the childhood landscape of the one who experiences it. But already, among his companions, his presence forbade one thing: turning Ground Zero into an abstract sanctuary of death.

Life went on at the construction site.

It was there in the bodies that worked, in family ties, in the gestures passed down, in those who arrived in the morning, in those who continued into the evening. This coexistence of the represented catastrophe and concrete life seems crucial to me today. A work devoted to death that forgets the living misses its point. It is the living who carry the memory. It is they who build, observe, and transmit. They are also those to whom the work will one day have to be entrusted.

This is why I have always refused to reduce the Abode of Chaos to an aesthetics of catastrophe understood superficially as a fascination with destruction. The aesthetics of catastrophe has a rigorous theoretical and artistic genealogy, notably in the work of Paul Virilio, but it does not signify a love of disaster. It questions what catastrophe reveals about a system, its speed, its technology, its vulnerabilities.

Ground Zero was fully part of this questioning.

Constructing an architecture of collapse also meant examining what our civilization had invested in the towers: power, technology, finance, vertical speed, visibility. When the towers fall, it is not only an architectural form that is affected; it is an imaginary construct. But this reflection was never separated, on the construction site, from much more immediate questions.

It had to be moved.

To weld.

To flow.

To strenghten.

Measure.

Check.

This constant alternation between civilization and the bolt, between history and welding, between Baudrillard and a mass that must be lifted, corresponds exactly to my way of thinking.

I don't believe in watertight disciplines.

I can move from a philosophical concept to a mechanical problem without perceiving a break because, for me, they are two scales of the same reality. The danger would only be to mistake one for the other. Philosophy does not replace the companion's know-how. Technology does not replace the question of meaning.

Ground Zero was supposed to exist precisely at their intersection.

It was also during these construction nights that I rediscovered a form of time that I had known in other periods of my life: those moments when a project reaches such a density that it seems to possess its own metabolism.

We no longer really ask ourselves whether we should continue.

We continue because the whole thing has entered a phase where each action calls for another.

This dynamic can be dangerous if left unchecked. Acceleration can lead to poor decisions. Therefore, it's essential to learn to maintain a degree of composure amidst the intensity.

Watch again.

Don't fall in love with a solution simply because it costs a lot of effort.

Knowing how to undo.

That too is part of the job.

A full day's work doesn't entitle you to a flawed form. You have to be able to look at what you've just done and say: no. Let's start again.

This requirement is difficult on a construction site, because behind a poorly placed part lies the time and fatigue of several people. But truly respecting the work of the tradespeople means precisely not forcing them to implement a solution that we know is wrong in order to avoid having to start over.

Rigour is also a form of respect.

Gradually, something was emerging. Not yet the complete image the visitor would later come to know, but a topography. The space was changing in density. Certain masses were already giving the body a different sensation when one approached them. That was what I was looking for.

I didn't want Ground Zero to be understandable solely from a photograph.

A photograph should be able to show the work, but never contain it.

You had to stand before it.

To feel its scale.

To understand that this mass actually exists.

The gaze had to become physical.

This is one of the fundamental differences between the press image that had been our starting point and the sculpture that we were building.

The image of 9/11 reached us from a distance.

Ground Zero was meant to abolish this distance in a different way: not by reproducing the catastrophe, which would have been obscene and impossible, but by forcing the visitor to move physically within an architecture that would no longer allow them to remain an outsider.

He should enter, go around, raise or lower his gaze, feel certain masses above or around him.

This idea of the entrance would gradually lead to the cavern. But we weren't there yet.

Before the symbol, there was always the construction site. And before the cavern became an opposition to the towers, men had to build the physical conditions for that opposition. That's why, when I look at Ground Zero today, I never see just the sculpture.

I can still see my companions there.

Some gestures have disappeared under other layers of material. Some operations are no longer legible in the final form. But they are there.

A monumental work is also made up of everything it encompasses. The hours are within. The fatigue is within. The abandoned decisions are within. The expertise of those whose names do not appear on the label is within.

Nadège is involved in this story.

Sydney is part of this story.

The family is there.

The companions are there.

This is why the Abode of Chaos is for me a Total Work of Art in the most concrete sense: not because it would pretentiously want to contain everything, but because it absorbs lives, knowledge, tools, historical events, conflicts of interpretation, domestic gestures and industrial masses in the same continuum.

Ground Zero was one of the most radical demonstrations of this.

9/11 began in front of a screen, in a world of shock.

A few weeks, then a few months later, it had become here the noise of a construction site, the heat of the worked metal, the fatigue of bodies and this temporary community gathered around a work whose future none of us could yet measure exactly.

And in the middle of this world of adults, machines, steel and concrete, there was Sydney.

He did not view History from the outside. He literally grew up within it. It is to him that the narrative must now turn.