Until now, the body was everywhere in Ground Zero without yet being truly named as one of its materials.

There were the bodies absent from September 11, those that images could not return to their families, the bodies of the photographers from whom we had awaited news, the bodies of the companions who worked day and night, that of Sydney who was growing up in the middle of the construction site, that of the future visitor whom the work would force to travel differently.

And then my own body abruptly entered the story.

The eye was injured.

This detail could be treated as a peripheral accident, almost like a footnote in a narrative devoted to a monumental sculpture. That would be a mistake. Not because this injury would make me a hero of the construction site—I am deeply suspicious of that kind of mythology—but because it suddenly brings the whole question of Ground Zero back to its most concrete point.

Seeing is never a disembodied operation.

The eye, which receives an image, is an organ. It can be damaged. It can lose part of its capacity. It can remind the brain, which believes itself sovereign, that the world first arrives through a vulnerable body.

I had spent weeks talking about the gaze, the image, about what needed to be preserved from the shock of 9/11 before commentary dulled its impact. I had explained to myself as much as to others that the artwork had to remove images from the flow, restore them to a different duration, force the viewer to see anew. And now the very organ of sight reminded me of its fragility.

I don't believe in signs in the sense that an eye injury would magically confirm the meaning of a work. That would be too easy, and especially too convenient in hindsight.

An accident is still an accident.

But once it has taken place, it necessarily transforms the consciousness of the person experiencing it. It introduces into a project a factor that can no longer be ignored.

I could continue to think of vision as a system of perception, signs, framing, and bias. Now, I also knew with a new immediacy that before all these concepts lay the raw body. A membrane. A cornea. An eyeball. A bundle of nerves. Living matter, extremely vulnerable.

This biological truth is a salutary brutality for someone who works precisely with the gaze. We tend to speak of the gaze as an almost spiritual entity. The gaze of the artist. The gaze of the witness. The gaze of History. All these expressions are valid, but they can make us forget their physical basis. There is no gaze without a body. The towers had been seen by millions of eyes on screens, but at the foot of the buildings there was dust getting in your eyes, debris, heat, thick air, the human body directly confronted with a materiality that was anything but media-driven. At the Abode of Chaos, we obviously couldn't reproduce this experience, and we certainly shouldn't pretend to. But we could work with this fundamental idea: the event doesn't exist solely as an image. It exists through what it does to bodies. The eye injury brought me closer to this reality, not by making me for a second like those who had lived through Ground Zero—a comparison that would be indecent—but simply by reminding me that any monumental construction physically engages the person who builds it. There is a radical difference between writing about a mass and working alongside it. The text lets you imagine the weight. The construction site reminds you of it.

There are areas where matter takes precedence over language: a sheet of metal, an I-beam, a mass of concrete, a projection, a shard, a tool. Each possesses its own kinetic energy. They know neither the artistic intention nor the reputation of the person standing next to them. The injury instantly reintroduces humility. It says: you are working in reality. And this reality has consequences.

I rediscovered a lesson I'd known since childhood. In Romagnieu, the machines, the tools, the animals, the structures already possessed this silent pedagogy. One could be extremely intelligent and still lose to a poorly calculated lever. One could have a brilliant theory and still be wrong when faced with a material that resisted.

That relationship has never left me. Perhaps it explains why I've never been able to conceive of a work solely as an intellectual proposition. An idea that hasn't met with resistance always remains, for me, incomplete.

With Ground Zero, this resistance now reached my own body. This necessarily changed the way I proceeded. Not by producing paralyzing caution. The construction had to continue. But with a heightened awareness that every aesthetic decision was coupled with a technical decision, and every technical decision with a human responsibility. This is where the role of the companions becomes crucial. On a construction site of this nature, safety is never an administrative abstraction added after the creative act. It is inherent in the very act of creation.

When considerable masses must be lifted, fixed, and assembled, when steel and concrete begin to compose a topography that visitors will later traverse, the form cannot be separated from the way it stands. Aesthetics and engineering meet precisely there.

I even believe that this constraint sometimes enhances the work. Structural necessity can force us to find a more appropriate solution than the one initially envisioned. A reinforcement can become a symbol. A connection can become a drawing. A mechanical difficulty can alter an entire composition. This is what interests me in the notion of forming form: form doesn't descend from the sky onto passive matter; it is constructed through the interaction between an intention and the resistances encountered. The material responds. The body responds. The construction site responds. The work evolves.

The eye injury thus entered into this general conversation. It had no intrinsic value, but it forced me to listen differently. I had to keep looking even as looking had just become more difficult, more present, more conscious. And this situation produced a very strange paradox: Ground Zero was a work born from a saturation of images, and I suddenly discovered how much each image depends on a fragile capacity to receive it.

We live as if seeing were a given. We open our eyes and the world is there. As long as no harm disrupts this continuity, we forget the extraordinary complexity of this operation. Wounds shatter this innocence. They introduce absence into the visible. And this absence unexpectedly connected with one of the central problems of the work: how to represent a catastrophe without believing that the image can show everything?

From the very beginning, 9/11 taught us precisely this. The images were everywhere, yet they didn't encompass the event itself. They showed the towers, the impact, the smoke, the collapses, sometimes the bodies, the firefighters, the streets. They didn't show the entirety of the lives cut short. They didn't show the family stories, the conversations from the day before, the plans, the ordinary gestures. They didn't show the future destroyed with each person. The most spectacular image always leaves something outside the frame.

The eye injury reminded me of this limitation from within the very perceptual apparatus.

Seeing is never seeing everything.

This is a crucial lesson, also for this book. A narrative of transmission carries the same danger as an image: giving the reader the illusion that because a text is rich, well-documented, and precise, it is complete. It never is. We create frames. We choose scenes. We juxtapose fragments. Intelligence lies less in denying this blind spot than in recognizing its existence.

The wounded gaze is perhaps, in this sense, a more accurate metaphor for the work of memory than a supposedly omniscient gaze: it sees a lot, but it now knows that something may still be missing.

This awareness was particularly important because the work itself risked being interpreted as an attempt to summarize 9/11 in a sculpture. I wanted precisely the opposite. A sculpture should not summarize. It should create a zone of resistance to summary. The mass, the passage, the void, the scale, the symbols—all these were meant to prevent the catastrophe from being reduced to a single meaning.

This is why the three Gothic sections were to become crucial. They would not be three decorative elements added to create a dramatic tone. They would structure the space and shift the relationship between elevation and collapse.

Gothic architecture has long fascinated me because of its almost audacious architectural ambition: to create height with stone, to lighten mass through structure, to guide the gaze upward, to transform a physical constraint into a vertical aspiration. The cathedral is a machine of verticality as much as a theological space. Yet Ground Zero was born from a catastrophe that had precisely destroyed vertical structures that had themselves become global symbols.

Introducing Gothic elements into this architecture therefore produced an extremely strong temporal telescoping: an ancient spiritual verticality met the ruin of a modern economic verticality.

I didn't want to present this as a learned equation imposed after the fact. The connection arose from the form itself. An arch, a section, a rise, a gap immediately possess resonances that transcend their constructive function. The language of architecture is ancient in human memory. We recognize certain forms almost without learning them: the door. The tower. The vault. The cavern. The tomb. The threshold. These are spatial archetypes as much as built objects. Ground Zero had to work with this memory.

The three Gothic sections thus introduced the survival of a wounded verticality. Not a reproduction of the towers, but something that still conveyed the momentum while simultaneously showing that this momentum had been broken. I liked this contradiction: constructing vertical elements within a work dedicated to collapse, then organizing their relationship to horizontal masses, to the cavern, to passageways, and to crushed structures. It was a way of not confining the work to ruin. A ruin that no longer holds the memory of verticality is merely a heap. For a collapse to be perceptible, the viewer must still be able to imagine what stood before. The fragment carries the memory of the absent whole.

This is one of the powers of ruined architecture. A single section of a wall can be more evocative than an intact building because it forces the mind to reconstruct what is missing. Here again, we encounter the question of perception: the visible becomes the support for the invisible. A Gothic fragment mentally conjures up an architecture that is no longer there.

Ground Zero proceeded in a similar way. We were not seeking to reconstruct the Twin Towers; we were seeking the material conditions by which the visitor would feel that an absent structure continues to weigh on what he sees.

This is where the masses of steel and concrete took on their meaning. Ground Zero involved several tens of tons of material. What mattered was not the figure itself, but the necessity of the mass: the artwork could not be light in the face of such a heavy catastrophe. The visitor's body had to perceive the weight even before knowing its exact measure. This is a fundamental difference between actual weight and represented weight. A photograph of steel can evoke power. Several tens of tons installed in space do indeed alter the physical conditions of the location. They produce inertia. They necessitate the design of foundations, supports, and load distribution. They remind you that gravity is a political law as much as a physical one in the tower's collective imagination: what rises must be supported, what supports can break, and when an immense structure loses its coherence, the very gravity that allowed it to exist becomes the force of its collapse. That seesaw made me dizzy.

The tower is a pact with gravity.

Its entire art lies in rising despite it. Collapse is the moment when that pact ends. Ground Zero had to make that reversal perceptible. That is why the masses were not merely necessary to achieve monumentality. They carried the concept itself.

Steel is the material of modern structures, of great spans, of skyscrapers, of industrial infrastructure. Concrete is the material of foundations, of bunkers, of mass, of anchoring. Bringing them together in a work about 9/11 created an almost tautological materiality: that from which modernity builds its power became the very material through which we questioned its vulnerability.

Here again, it was necessary to resist the vertigo. Monumental steel can very easily become spectacular. A large mass naturally produces an effect. But I didn't want weight to be an argument of aesthetic authority.

“Look how heavy it is” is not a thought.

Mass should only matter if it truly altered the experience and the meaning. That is why each ton had to be organized, oriented, and considered in relation to the voids, the surfaces, the passages. The apparent Chaos depended on a structure. I emphasize this point because it is often misunderstood when discussing the Abode of Chaos. Visual disorder is not the method; it is sometimes the perceptual effect produced by a complex organization. We did not throw tons of steel to create ruin. We composed a geometry of catastrophe.

This term seems apt to me: geometry. It encompasses both rigor and the possibility of chaos. A real collapse appears random to the observer, but it obeys the properties of materials, load transfers, ruptures, speed, and weak points. It possesses physics.

Similarly, the work had to produce a sense of accident while being designed not to be accidental. It was precisely this contradiction that the three Gothic sections made spectacular: what appeared torn had to be built to last. What evoked fragility had to possess real stability. The artist's wounded body had reminded us of the limit; the architecture now had to demonstrate that it had learned the lesson.

The eye injury also had another, more intimate effect. It momentarily altered the relationship between the inner and outer worlds. When a part of perception becomes painful or uncertain, the world draws closer. What was previously simply seen suddenly demands effort. Attention intensifies.

We become aware of distances we previously considered automatic. I don't want to overinterpret my experience, but I know that this heightened awareness corresponded strangely to what I was aiming for with Ground Zero: to make the visitor stop automatically gliding through the images, to pull them out of this economy of sight where the eye glides from one sign to the next without encountering any resistance.

Much of our contemporary environment is designed to facilitate this slippery slope. Interfaces, media, advertising, information flows all want our gaze to keep going. Artwork, however, can ask it to stop. Pain also stops. It is obviously not aesthetically pleasing, but it teaches you the value of stopping. Perhaps this is what made me even more determined to give Ground Zero this capacity for suspension. It shouldn't be understandable at a single glance. The structure was designed to deny the total panorama. Certain parts were meant to obscure others. The visitor had to piece it together. This principle already foreshadowed the cavern, because the cavern is the exact opposite of the panoramic view offered by the tower.

The towers promise mastery of vision: to ascend in order to see further, to dominate the territory from height. The cave eliminates the horizon. It forces you to look at what is close. It places you within the material world. Between the two lay an opposition far greater than that of two architectural forms. But this opposition could only emerge after resolving the material problems that made it possible.

The three Gothic sections had to be put in place. The masses had to be positioned. The loads had to be distributed. The composition had to begin to hold together as an organism. The construction therefore progressed despite the injury, or rather, with it now integrated into the consciousness of the work.

I don't want to give the reader a false, stoic image where you get injured and immediately resume as if the body had no say in the matter. The body imposes its own rhythms, its own care, its own limits. These must be respected.

But there's a difference between respecting a limit and turning that limit into surrender. Ground Zero had to continue because the project had begun. The workers had poured their energy into it. Nadège was committed. Sydney was growing up nearby. The raw material was there. The structure, once begun, existed as an open question.

This moment made me understand what a truly authorial work, whose creation demands a multitude of skills, really means: it is born from an individual vision, then, in its execution, encounters a variety of skills, constraints, and responsibilities without the author's conceptual authority ever wavering. The companions know a part of its material History and the conditions of its creation. Furthermore, the work partially escapes all anticipation: the materials impose their own laws, History offers new interpretations, and future perspectives shift its meaning even further. Even my injury, contingent as it was, now became an addition to this stratigraphy, without my having chosen it. This is what fascinates me about works that endure: they accumulate heterogeneous causes and end up becoming more intelligent than their initial project. Not intelligent in the human sense, but richer in relationships than any single mind could have foreseen.

The Abode of Chaos functions in this way. It is made up of conscious decisions and unforeseen consequences, of plans and accidents, of legal, technical, human, political, and natural constraints. Its true order arises precisely from the way these layers ultimately interact.

Ground Zero already offered an extreme concentration of these elements. 9/11 had created the necessity. The waiting had introduced the sense of lack. Baudrillard and Fukuyama had opened up lines of thought. The companions had given their bodies to the construction site. Sydney had introduced the concept of lineage. My eye injury introduced the vulnerability of the gaze.

The three Gothic sections would now organize a memory of verticality. And the tens of tons of steel and concrete would give the whole what screens could never provide: a real gravity.

It was at this point that sculpture truly began to become architecture. No longer just a set of placed signs, but a space capable of modifying movement, perception, and soon the inner state of the person who passes through it.

Its fundamental opposition still needed to be found. It emerged gradually with an almost archaic clarity: facing the tower, there had to be the cave. The tower belongs to the man who wants to dominate the sky. The cave belongs to the man who returns to the earth. Between them, the entire story of Ground Zero could begin to unfold.