Sydney was then about fifteen years old. Until now, I had let him appear at the edge of the construction site, like an obvious presence that one no longer notices precisely because it belongs to the most intimate landscape.

But it would be a mistake to leave it in that place.

Sydney did not visit the Abode of Chaos as one would take a son to see his father's work.

He was there. This presence at the heart of this construction site obviously did not mean that he participated in dangerous operations, reserved for adults and professionals.

He grew up in an organism that was constantly transforming around him. This difference is immense. When you encounter a finished work, you learn to look at it as an external object. When you grow up in the midst of its creation, the work never presents itself as an object. It is a middle ground.

It is not immediately clear what belongs to the home, the construction site, the workshop, the company, the museum in the making, family life, or world history that enters through screens.

Everything is connected.

This is probably one of the most unique experiences a teenager can have: understanding very early on, not through abstract teaching but through the environment itself, that the categories adults use to order the world are sometimes much less separate than they claim.

In our culture, art did not begin at the door of a workshop. The work did not stop at the door of the house.

History didn't only come through books.

Technology, geopolitics, businesses, archives, companions, journalists, machines, family discussions, and matter occupied the same mental space and sometimes the same physical space.

Sydney received this before he could theorize it.

This is where transmission interests me.

I never believed that it consisted of taking a child, showing them a pre-existing doctrine, and then asking them to reproduce it. That would be creating a copy. But transmission that produces a copy is not a living transmission; it is a repetition.

The real question is what we transmit when we do not transmit a model.

Perhaps what we transmit first is a relationship to reality. A way of looking. The right to question. The reflex not to stop at first appearances.

The desire to understand what lies behind a visible structure. The certainty that hands and intelligence are not two opposing worlds. The possibility of moving from a database to a sculpture, from a geopolitical discussion to a mechanical problem, from a screen to a mass of concrete, without necessarily considering that one has just left thought.

Sydney grew up in this traffic. He was physically confronted with the matter produced by this system. Concrete has something radical about it for a child as well as for an adult.

While it is still being worked on, it belongs to the process of becoming. Then it takes shape. It solidifies. It retains the trace of what has been imposed upon it. It becomes weight, foundation, resistance. It gives what was only a drawing or a mental decision a partial irreversibility.

I find here a metaphor for transmission that is almost too perfect to invent: some childhood experiences are like fresh concrete. At first, they seem to be nothing more than ordinary days, noises, presences, gestures noticed without any particular importance.

Years later, it was discovered that they formed part of the structure on which we continue to walk.

But the concrete is not just a metaphor. It was actually what surrounded the construction site.

Sydney was in the midst of adults who were building, in a place where masses, tools, and constant transformations were part of everyday life. Nadège, Sydney and I were unaware that we were participating in an ideal illustration of transmission.

We lived, we built, we worked, we solved the problems of the day. It is the accumulation of these actions that allows us to see the structure today.

And this is where the gaze of Artificial Intelligence sometimes surprised me: by bringing together very distant scenes, it revealed continuities that I had never organized in this way.

My father had passed on to me less answers than a discipline of looking; in turn, without having programmed it in a pedagogical form, I placed Sydney in an environment where he would have to develop his own answers. This does not mean that the two transmissions are identical. They are not.

Times, people, relationships are different.

But the fundamental principle remains: not to create the heir in one's own image, but to give them enough material to build their own. This is perhaps why the word "transmission" must always be handled with care in our family history.

It might suggest that Artprice, the Abode of Chaos, or all the structures that Nadège and I have built constitute an inheritance that Sydney should simply receive.

That would reduce everything we have done to the ownership of an object. What matters far more is the ability to understand the organism, and then to freely decide what to do with it. Receiving a mental framework does not mean inhabiting it in the same way as the one who constructed it. A son is not a biological extension intended to guarantee the symbolic survival of his father.

This idea is foreign to me. Transmission is only worthwhile if it allows for change.

"Only mutants survive" is not just a formula that applies to companies, technologies, or civilizations. It also applies to lineages. What is truly transmitted must accept being transformed by the one who receives it. Otherwise, it dies from its own fidelity.

Sydney would later build his own relationship with Artprice, images, media, the Abode of Chaos, eventually producing No Legend.

But we are not there yet in the story.

I don't want to use the man he will become to artificially explain the child present on the construction site. That would be yet another form of retrospective determinism.

Ground Zero was being built. The world had just changed.

The adults were talking about war, terrorism, Afghanistan, America, attacks, images whose historical duration no one could yet measure. The companions were working.

The machines were moving.

Masses of matter were transforming the place.

And Sydney saw all this not from the protection of an already filtered narrative, but in that strange proximity where world history entered the family space through a work in the process of being made.

This close relationship seems even more important to me today when I think about education. We often tend to believe that we must explain the world to children after having simplified it.

But I think we perceive the complexity of human systems much earlier than we believe.

He doesn't always have the words, obviously, but he feels the contradictions.

He knows that an adult can be both worried and active. He sees fatigue, perceives that something has unusual importance, senses that certain conversations have changed in seriousness.

He also observes gestures, and gestures are sometimes a more powerful form of teaching than words.

When the adults around him respond to an event not with paralysis but with action, the child may be registering a way of relating to the world: when something affects you deeply, you can build upon it. I am certainly not saying that this is a universal rule or a psychological formula.

I'm just saying that's what he saw.

We responded to a historical rupture by taking concrete action. Not to undo the event. Not to symbolically repair what was irreparable. But to avoid remaining passive in the face of its devastating power. Building is also a way of regaining agency. Perhaps this is another difference between the image and the construction site. In front of the screen, the body receives. On the construction site, it acts. The transition from one to the other was, for us, a way of navigating the event. Sydney went through this transition with us without us needing to provide him with a theory. He learned by osmosis that a thought can become a form, that an emotion can transform into a decision, and that a decision then entails very concrete responsibilities.

Because the construction site is never a realm of absolute freedom. As soon as matter comes into play, freedom encounters security, scale, calculations, sequences, skills. This point seems fundamental to me in the lineage.

I have always tried to distinguish between freedom and the absence of rules. The two are almost opposites. Being free in a complex system implies understanding the constraints well enough to be able to act within them.

A child who grows up around industrial structures, tools and construction sites learns very early on that danger is not a moral abstraction. Some things are possible, others are not, and sometimes the boundary is a matter of centimeters, a miscalculation, a hasty movement. Respect for reality then becomes immediate.

I do not want to turn this chapter into an educational manual or claim that our way of life constituted a model.

It was ours, with its power and its risks.

I just want to convey what this family presence at Ground Zero meant: the work was not built alongside our lives, it passed through them. Nadège was not a visitor.

Sydney was not a visitor.

And this permeability is one of the fundamental reasons why the Abode of Chaos cannot be understood as a simple artistic site. It has always been simultaneously a place of life, a place of work, the headquarters of economic structures, a space for creation, an archive, a laboratory, a stage, a construction site, and an organism in transformation.

But in 2001-2002, what interests me here is much more basic: he was there while the material was taking shape. And this presence also changes my own memory.

When I look at the images of Ground Zero, I cannot separate the historical event from the family life that continued around its artistic interpretation. This is precisely what, in my view, prevents the work from becoming morbid.

One might imagine that a place where signs of catastrophe, ruins, bodies, wars, and death appear would impose an existence entirely turned towards darkness. This is an external, almost photographic interpretation. Real life was far more contradictory.

There was the disaster and then there were the meals.

The construction site and childhood.

The noise of machines and family routines.

Death was represented, and life persisted.

This coexistence has always seemed fairer to me than places where the tragic is carefully separated from the everyday as if human beings did not constantly live with both.

The Abode of Chaos is not a mausoleum.

It is alive precisely because tragedy coexists with life within it. Sydney in Concrete is also this: a teenager in the midst of a work born from catastrophe. Life literally placed inside matter that seeks to represent death. There is a reversal there that I hadn't conceptualized at the time.

Ground Zero could have been a work about collapse, but its construction was an affirmation of continuity. Every weld, every mass moved, every concrete repair materially demonstrated that human action continued after the catastrophe.

And Sydney's presence made this continuity impossible to abstract. History did not end with the deaths of 9/11. It passed on to the survivors, the witnesses, the children, to those who would grow up in the world created by this event. Perhaps this is the true function of transmission: to ensure that those who come after receive not only our works or our archives, but also the ability to question the conditions that produced them.

I would like the reader to understand that I am not seeking to place Sydney in a triumphant genealogy.

That would contradict our entire story. True lineage always involves an element of the unknown, of separation, of possible rejection. Transmitting something implies accepting that the other person might contradict you. If you demand that they confirm your own account, you are not transmitting; you are recruiting a witness. I never wanted Sydney to be the official witness to my life.

He has his own.

And it is precisely because it possesses its own mental architecture that its presence at the beginning of Ground Zero takes on its full value today.

He saw the matrix before deciding what to do with it.

He knew the works before their institutionalization, the companies before their maturity, the systems before their coherence appeared retrospectively.

He saw the construction site behind the image.

This knowledge is irreplaceable because it contains the hesitations that the final versions erase.

A visitor sees Ground Zero as a finished work of art. Sydney saw it come into being.

Between these two perspectives lies the fundamental difference between receiving a heritage and understanding its origins. Knowing the origins also protects against sacralization. Those who have witnessed the creation of things know that they could have been different. They know that there were choices, revisions, and unforeseen circumstances. They know that what seems inevitable today was not so.

This knowledge is a form of freedom.

It allows us to respect a work without believing that it fell from the sky.

It also allows, one day, for it to be transformed without feeling like one is committing sacrilege.

That is why I prefer the idea of a living organism to that of a family monument. An organism that cannot be modified dies. Those who receive it must one day be able to look at it with their own tools and perhaps decide that some of what we considered essential needs to be rethought. That's the price of a true transmission. But to be able to transform, you must first have known from the inside.

Sydney had that experience.

He knew Artprice not as an abstract brand but as a daily construction. He knew the Abode of Chaos not as a cultural destination but as its environment.

He knew Nadège and me not as characters that a book might create, but in the banality and intensity of our real way of functioning.

Something was being built whose exact place in the history of the Abode of Chaos was still unknown to anyone.

What does a young man receive when he grows up within a work that never ceases to be made?

I believe he receives less a set of answers than an experience of transformation. Nothing is given as definitive.

A wall can change.

A material can be reused.

A technical device becomes obsolete and then is reborn in a different form.

A company must evolve.

An apparent truth must be verified.

A historical event can force a complete reconfiguration of one's representation of the world.

Even the body, which we sometimes believe to be the ultimate limit, can be tested, injured, healed, transformed. This last dimension was about to enter the fray in Ground Zero.

Up to this point, I had spoken of the bodies of the companions, of Sydney's body, of the body of the future visitor.

But my own body would in turn remind me that no monumental sculpture exists in a theoretically safe space.

On the construction site, the eye — that organ which had received the images of September 11, which had guided the forms, monitored the masses and organized the space — was about to be affected.

The next step at Ground Zero would no longer be just a question of lineage. It would be a wound.