From the moment this opposition became apparent, Ground Zero ceased to be merely a construction dedicated to the collapse of the towers. It became a much older confrontation between two ways that man has of inhabiting the world: to ascend or to bury himself, to dominate the horizon or to disappear into matter, to seek light through height or to rediscover in darkness the first human architecture.

The tower and the cave are not just two forms. They are almost two anthropologies.

The tower belongs to conquest. It produces distance. The higher one climbs, the more the world is transformed into a map. Men become points, streets become lines, territories become surfaces that the gaze believes it can encompass.

All of modernity has fostered this vertical fascination. The tower is technical, economic, political, and symbolic. It affirms that a society can momentarily overcome gravity, concentrate thousands of human beings in a single structure, and circulate energy, information, capital, elevators, communications, and decision-making hundreds of meters above the ground. The skyscraper is as much a machine as it is a piece of architecture.

It is also a representation of power. It doesn't just occupy the territory; it leaves its mark on it. When you see Manhattan from afar, you don't just see buildings. You see a system. It was precisely this system that was breached on 9/11.

But rebuilding a mutilated tower at the Abode of Chaos would have been too simple. We would have reproduced the damaged form without questioning the imagery it carried.

The cave introduced a reversal. It forced one to abandon the overarching view. It no longer allowed one to dominate space; it contained you. There was no longer a horizon. The body entered an architecture that enveloped it, the entirety of which it could not immediately comprehend. This is probably one of humanity's oldest spatial experiences. Before the tower, there was the shelter. Before the rising architecture, there was the cavity that protects. The cavern is womb and tomb, refuge and anxiety, origin and return. It may evoke Plato, of course, but I didn't want to reduce this form to a philosophical quote placed on the construction site. Its power was much more elemental.

We enter a cave with our bodies before we enter it with our culture. The temperature is changing.

The light is changing.

The perception of distances changes.

The sound changes.

We no longer stand in front of a work of art: we are inside it. That's what I was aiming for. The visitor shouldn't simply look at Ground Zero from a position of aesthetic security. They needed to lose some of that sense of sovereignty. Not to terrorize them, much less to artificially recreate what the victims had experienced—which would have been indecent—but to shift the dynamics of their gaze.

The tower offers you a panoramic view.

The cavern blocks your view.

The tower enhances visibility.

The cave reintroduces the blind spot.

The tower places man above.

The cave puts him back inside.

This opposition was a direct response to everything that 9/11 had taught me about images. We had seen so much, and yet we didn't know everything.

We had witnessed the collapse almost live, and we were unable to grasp the full extent of the causes, the lives, the consequences.

Excessive visibility had not produced omniscience. On the contrary, it had produced a heightened awareness of what lay beyond the frame. Ground Zero therefore needed to contain a space where this boundary became physical. The cavern fulfilled this need.

But it couldn't exist on its own. If it had constituted the entire apparatus, it would have transformed the work into a retreat, a withdrawal, perhaps even a refuge. However, the event we were discussing was also one of movement, speed, and collision. It was therefore necessary to introduce lines that would traverse the mass.

It was here that the railway took on a far greater importance than a mere element of industrial decor. Since the 19th century, the railway has been one of the great systems for transforming time and space. It bridges distances, organizes territories, and accelerates the movement of goods, people, armies, and economies. It belongs to industrial modernity as profoundly as the skyscraper belongs to metropolitan modernity.

But the railway also carries another, much darker memory. The 20th century transformed it into the logistical instrument of mass population displacements, deportations, wars, and exterminations. A railway line is therefore never entirely innocent in our European memory. It can signify travel, progress, and connection; it can also become the tragic line that carries humanity toward what it does not want to reach. In Ground Zero, the railway was not intended to be a literal reference to a specific historical event. It became a kind of tragic axis of the 21st century, a line that runs through the architecture and reminds us that technical systems always possess this fundamental ambiguity: they are capable of emancipating as much as enslaving, of connecting as much as leading to destruction.

This ambivalence has always interested me. I've never been a technophobe. That would be absurd given my life. I've built networks, databases, information flow infrastructures. I believed very early on in the power of the internet and the need to digitize entire sectors. But precisely because I know technology from the inside, I've never been able to consider it morally autonomous.

I start rather from this distinction: a technology does not, in itself, possess its own morality; but the architectures, uses and effects that it makes possible immediately become political.

The commercial airplane provided an absolute demonstration of this on 9/11. An instrument of global mobility, it was transformed into a weapon by those who knew how to turn one of the system's own infrastructures against it. Modernity was thus struck by its own objects.

The railway in Ground Zero responded to this logic: to remind us that infrastructure always carries more than it claims to carry. It carries a model of civilization, a speed, a relationship to distance, a capacity for organization, but also the possibility of its perversion. This is why the term "tragic railway of the 21st century" seemed apt to me. It shouldn't be understood as a prophecy in the dramatic sense of the word. It referred to a century which we were brutally discovering would not be freed from tragedy by technology.

The old positivist dream of technological progress automatically producing moral progress had once again been refuted. We already knew this after the world wars, after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, totalitarian regimes, and industrial exterminations.

Yet each generation seems to rebuild, in a new form, the hope that its own modernity will escape the barbarities of the past. 9/11 served as a reminder that the sophistication of systems does not abolish human violence; it can sometimes provide it with new means.

It is this tragic continuity that I wanted to inscribe in the space without turning Ground Zero into a historical encyclopedia. I believe that a work risks weakening itself when it tries to say everything. I prefer to select a few forms open enough to allow several temporalities to enter into them.

The tower.

The cave.

The railway.

Steel.

Concrete.

The void.

Then the bodies.

This was obviously the most dangerous question.

How can we work on 9/11 without encountering the images of the men and women who, trapped in the towers, fell?

These images exist. Some have been published, others withdrawn, discussed, almost repressed by the media themselves, so difficult was their integration into the public narrative due to their violence. Yet they constitute one of the most terrible aspects of the event because they brutally reduce what could have become an architectural abstraction to an impossible human decision.

When we say "the towers collapsed," language unintentionally produces a form of neutrality. It speaks of buildings. The falling bodies destroy this neutrality. They force us to understand that within the architecture were people facing choices, none of which should belong to a human life.

I was aware that by entering this territory, art found itself on the edge of a moral boundary. Showing can become obscene. Not showing can become another way of erasing. A third way had to be found: to make the presence of bodies felt without transforming them into a spectacular motif.

I didn't want to reproduce the photographic moment as an icon intended to provoke. This distinction must be constantly maintained: in my conception, the Total Work of Art should question rather than seek to provoke. Provocation would have consisted of using the violence of a falling body to elicit a reaction from the viewer.

The challenge lies in introducing human presence in such a way that the architecture can no longer be viewed as a mere fascinating ruin. The body forbids the pure aesthetic pleasure of the catastrophe. It says: someone was there. That is why it was necessary. Ground Zero had to be prevented from becoming a beautiful ruin.

Art history has long been fascinated by ruins. Piranesi, Hubert Robert, ancient architecture, and Romanticism have all imbued the destroyed fragment with immense aesthetic power. But here we were not dealing with a ruin separated by centuries, cleansed by time of the immediacy of death. We were working almost simultaneously with the event itself. Any aestheticization, therefore, had to be carefully monitored.

I don't mean to say that form should be abandoned. A work without form is powerless. I mean that form had to be continually brought back to its responsibility. That is precisely what the bodies accomplished. They broke the monumental temptation. They reintroduced the human scale into tens of tons of steel and concrete.

A man, compared to a tower, seems minuscule. Yet a tower only has meaning because men inhabit it. By mentally removing the people from the World Trade Center, we reduce the event to a problem of engineering and geopolitics. By putting them back at the center, everything changes. The space becomes vulnerable. Height becomes vertigo. The window becomes a boundary.

This change of scale is exactly what I wanted to achieve in The Abode of Chaos: constantly shifting from the system to the individual. It's a method that can be found throughout my career.

Artprice works with millions of data points, but each data point ultimately leads back to an artist, a work of art, a transaction, a collector, a legacy. Geopolitics works with states and populations, but every war always ends up in the singular body of someone. A database like a military map can give the illusion that the world is composed of categories. Reality always reminds us that it is composed of individuals. Ground Zero could not escape this rule.

After the bodies came the firefighters. Here again, the risk of oversimplification was considerable. The firefighter immediately became one of the central heroic figures of 9/11. This heroization was understandable and deeply rooted in the actions performed that day. Men climbed up while thousands of others descended.

The entire moral architecture of the event lies almost entirely in this reverse movement: the danger dictates leaving; their function compels them to enter. The more threatening the tower, the higher they climb. It is a gesture that can be described without being fully explored. On a physical scale, it seems almost absurd: moving toward that from which every organism seeks to distance itself. On an ethical scale, it constitutes precisely the definition of their mission.

Ground Zero had to contain this contradiction. The firefighters couldn't simply be depicted as heroes, like on a traditional memorial. They had to appear as a force of meaning opposing the collapse. The towers fall.

They rise. Everything falls; they move upward. The movement itself becomes symbolic without the need for much explanation.

This is where the apocalyptic dimension of the work appeared. I use this word cautiously because it is now so widely used to describe any kind of catastrophe that it has almost lost its meaning. Apocalypse primarily means unveiling, revelation. What is removed from the veil becomes visible.

9/11 had that dimension for me. It didn't announce the end of the world; it revealed a world that some had stopped seeing.

It revealed the vulnerability of a superpower.

It revealed the ability of asymmetric actors to turn globalized infrastructures against those who had built them.

It revealed the global power of images.

It revealed the persistence of religion in a Western narrative that had sometimes relegated it to the private or archaic realm.

It revealed the porous relationship between finance, geopolitics, ideology, technology and communication.

It finally revealed that the 21st century would probably be anything but the peaceful period that some imaginations of the late 20th century had hoped for.

In this sense, firefighters and the Apocalypse could meet in Ground Zero: not as figures from a simplistic religious iconography, but as beings moving through a brutal revelation. Man confronted with what the system reveals of his fragility.

From its inception, the Abode of Chaos had a profound connection to religious, alchemical, esoteric, and historical symbols. But it was absolutely essential to avoid transforming 9/11 into a predetermined prophetic scene through a mystical interpretation.

Nothing interests me less than claiming after an event that it was predetermined. What interests me in symbols is their capacity to connect layers of time and thought, not to abolish historical causality. The Apocalypse, in Ground Zero, was therefore meant to remain what it is in the strongest sense: a revelation through catastrophe. A system previously certain of its visibility suddenly discovers what it did not see.

This is precisely the logic of the Blind Spot that permeates all my thinking. The blind spot isn't what lies far from the system. It's often produced by the system itself. We no longer see precisely what our own way of seeing excludes.

The tower is perhaps the perfect architecture for this illusion: because it allows us to see very far, it can make us forget that it too has a blind spot.

More generally, I believe that a power that dominates a space risks confusing its visibility of that space with its understanding of it. One can possess satellites, intelligence services, financial markets, databases, and global networks, yet remain blind to the configurations developing in the interstices of one's own system. 9/11 was also this: a violent return of the blind spot.

The cavern then responded to the tower in an even more precise way. It was not anti-modernity, nor a fantasy of returning to a primitive age. It simply embodied the necessity of momentarily relinquishing the all-encompassing vision. To enter the cave is to accept no longer seeing everything. It is to recognize that intelligence sometimes begins when visual dominance ceases.

This lesson was familiar to me through other means. My father had taught me very early on to look for what lies behind appearances, not to confuse a representation with the reality it claims to encompass.

Dowsing, peasant practices, animal observation, mechanics, networks, law, and the Art Market had all taught me the same thing in different ways: there are always weak signals that the dominant system of interpretation doesn't take into account. Ground Zero gave this method an architectural dimension.

The cavern became a space of weak signals. One sees less, therefore one listens more. One feels more. The body becomes an instrument. The relationship to the masses changes. A visitor can no longer believe that they have understood because they have taken a general photograph. That's why I attached so much importance to circulation. The artwork had to resist a single photograph. It had to demand multiple viewpoints, multiple temporalities, multiple movements. I already knew, from all the photographic work we were doing at the Abode of Chaos, that a work can be extraordinarily betrayed by the framing that purports to show it. A photograph isolates. It chooses. It flattens distances. It produces a composition different from the one the body encounters.

That is why I would later become so interested in aerial views, drones, site mapping and its systematic digitization: each viewpoint reveals an order that the other conceals. None is sufficient on its own. Ground Zero already operated according to this kaleidoscopic logic. The Gothic piece, seen from one place, could appear as a ruin; moved a few meters away, it became a threshold.

The rail could guide the gaze and then disappear beneath a mass. The cavern might have seemed protective before becoming oppressive. The depicted body might not appear until after the visitor had first been captivated by the architecture.

This sequence of gazes was constructed. Once again, the apparent Chaos was never a lack of composition. I liked the idea that the visitor might initially be drawn to the monumentality, then suddenly encounter what prevents them from fully appreciating it. They see the steel; then they see the body. They see the ruin; then they understand that it corresponds to a nearby history. They see a cavern; then they discover that it responds to the tower.

The artwork thus operates through delay. It doesn't reveal everything immediately. This is very different from provocation, which seeks instant impact. Questioning requires time. The viewer must have time to construct their own hypothesis and then see it challenged. This, for me, is where the artwork becomes truly active. It doesn't convey a message like a poster. It alters a state of perception.

In this context, firefighters occupied a unique place because they prevented the narrative from becoming one of pure destruction. 9/11 was an attack, a catastrophe, a tragedy, but also an immense collection of acts of rescue.

This dimension is essential. Even in a setting dedicated to collapse, it was necessary to preserve the movement of those who entered to save lives. Without this, Ground Zero risked producing a vision where destructive power stood alone.

But human History is never solely defined by destructive force. It is also defined by responses. The firefighter, the rescuer, the photographer, the doctor, the person who helps a stranger down a flight of stairs, the person who stays with someone when they could leave: all introduce another dimension into the event. This dimension doesn't eliminate the catastrophe, but it prevents reducing humanity to either victim or perpetrator. It reintroduces moral decision-making. This is what I wanted the Abode of Chaos to preserve.

I have never believed in a purely dark anthropology. Chaos is not evil. It is the field in which forms appear, transform, and clash. A catastrophe reveals the capacity for destruction, but also forms of courage that, without it, would have remained invisible. This is yet another apocalyptic dimension in the sense of unveiling: the event reveals systems and individuals. It shows the flaws of power and the unexpected strength of certain beings.

When these different lines began to hold together—the tower, the cavern, the rail, the bodies, the firefighters—I understood that Ground Zero had found its grammar. Not its definitive explanation, because I certainly didn't want that to exist, but a system of relationships strong enough for the work to begin to live without constant commentary from me. It's an essential threshold in creation.

As long as an artist has to remain beside their work to explain its meaning, something remains unfulfilled. The work must be able to function in their absence. It must accept misunderstanding, differing interpretations, sometimes even hostility. It must leave the viewer a space that belongs to them. I could construct the geometry, arrange the masses, decide on the symbols, but I could not and did not want to control what each person would experience.

This principle would become crucial when the first witnesses, visitors, journalists, relatives, and companions who hadn't followed all the stages of the construction found themselves at Ground Zero. We would be able to observe something that the author can never produce himself: the silence of the other.

I have always considered silence in the face of a work of art to be very different from approval. One can offer praise out of politeness. One can criticize reflexively. One can explain to show that one has understood. Silence is more ambiguous. It can signify rejection, emotion, incomprehension, the time needed to absorb what is before one. It offers no guarantee to the artist, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.

After months of noise, after the television broadcasts of September 11, the analyses, the machines, the welding, the companions, the displaced masses, the discussions, the pains and the decisions, Ground Zero was going to encounter that invisible matter which weighs no ton but which nevertheless decides the future life of a work: the gaze of the witnesses.

Only then would we know if the cavern against the towers, the tragic railway, the bodies and the firefighters could hold together without us. Only then could the construction site begin to become memory. And after so much uproar, what awaited me was not a speech. It was silence.