Then the others arrived. Perhaps it was only at that moment that Ground Zero truly ceased to be a construction site. Not because we had laid a final piece of steel, applied a final coat of paint, or administratively declared the work finished. A work like the Abode of Chaos is, in fact, never truly finished; rather, it reaches successive states of coherence before History, matter, or our own gaze shifts them once again.

Ground Zero, however, had crossed a threshold. For weeks and months, we had lived inside its construction. I knew each mass by its history, each decision by the hesitations that preceded it, each connection by the problems it had required solving. The companions knew the weariness contained within certain parts of the work.

Nadège knew all the sequences that the finished form now rendered invisible. Sydney had seen the matter arrive, change place, take hold, settle, gradually become this environment that would then seem to have always been there.

We could no longer look at Ground Zero as someone discovering it for the first time would. This is both the privilege and the curse of the builder: they know too much. They see beyond the surface. They remember the scaffolding that no longer exists, the room that was originally planned for somewhere else, the lost day, the near-miss, the injury, the discussion, the technical problem. They possess an immediate archaeology of the work.

But the viewer possesses none of this. They arrive with their own history, their own images of 9/11, perhaps their own wounds, their political convictions, their culture, their refusals, their beliefs, their memories. They owe us no loyalty. It is precisely for this reason that their gaze becomes indispensable. The artist can control the creation; they cannot control the reception without destroying what makes art something other than a message.

So I was waiting for this moment with particular attention. After so much talking, thinking, deciding, moving, and building, I now had to accept not intervening anymore. To let someone in. To watch them watch. It's a much more difficult experience than it seems.

The artist is always tempted to help. He sees a visitor stop before a form and wants to say: look at this instead, stand there, see how this line connects to that one, understand why the cavern echoes the towers, why the rail crosses this space, why these masses aren't simply arranged randomly. But every explanation given too soon robs the viewer of something. It replaces their discovery with your intention. It closes off paths before they've even been taken.

So I needed to learn to be silent in the face of my own work. This discipline of silence is perhaps one of the most difficult for someone like me, whose thinking works through rapid connections, associations, ramifications, an almost physical need to relate elements.

I can explain for hours how a sign refers to an event, how a form connects to another historical period, how alchemy, geopolitics, chaos theory, architecture, networks, and matter form a system. But if Ground Zero had truly found its purpose, then all of this should have been able to vanish when a man or woman entered it.

The work had to take over. Silence, therefore, did not signify the absence of thought. On the contrary, it was a test of thought. It was necessary to discover whether the thought embodied in matter would continue to work when the one who had organized it ceased to speak.

My first impressions taught me something I knew theoretically but had never experienced with such intensity: a work begins a second life when it enters the mind of another. That life escapes you.

The viewer makes connections you hadn't considered. They miss others you thought were obvious. They may be moved by a detail you deemed almost secondary and remain indifferent to what you thought was the focus of the composition. They bring with them images you are unaware of.

In the case of September 11, this personal element was immense, because almost everyone retained the memory of the moment they learned of the attack.

A television, an office, a radio, a telephone. A person called immediately, a relative living in New York, a worry, a disbelief.

9/11 belonged to world history, but it had also become part of millions of private biographies. Ground Zero therefore encountered not an abstract public but a constellation of memories.

It was at that moment that I understood even more clearly why it would have been wrong to try to dictate a single interpretation. We hadn't created a catechism of 9/11. We had created a space for debate.

The Abode of Chaos was never intended to tell the viewer what to think. Its purpose is to place them in a situation where they can no longer completely avoid thinking. This nuance, for me, encapsulates the essential difference between provocation and questioning.

Provocation often seeks a predictable reaction. It aims to scandalize, seduce, shock, and elicit immediate support or rejection. It depends heavily on the reaction it hopes to provoke. Questioning is more dangerous for the author because they don't know what the result will be.

The artwork puts something out in the world and accepts that the answer eludes it. This is what Marcel Duchamp understood in his fundamental idea that the artwork is only truly completed in the gaze of the viewer. I have long expressed it in my own way: the artwork must question, not provoke.

Ground Zero was an almost physical demonstration of this. The symbols were violent. The materials were heavy. The historical context allowed for no neutrality. Yet the goal was never to impose an emotion. Even the silence I observed could not be automatically interpreted as approval. That is what made it so precious. Someone might be silent because they were shaken. Another because they deeply rejected what they saw. A third because they were still searching for the words. A fourth because something in the work had awakened a memory they had no desire to share with us.

This opacity had to be respected. It's one of the most basic forms of respecting the viewer: not pretending to know what they feel.

We started with an event that had already become saturated with interpretations. From the very first hours, everyone wanted to say what 9/11 meant: governments, journalists, philosophers, experts, religious leaders, the military, economists, strategists. Two months later, the narratives were already competing.

The images seemed to demand a caption. Ground Zero was meant to do the opposite. To momentarily remove the caption. To give the viewer back a space of freedom. I didn't want someone to come in and read: this is what you should think about 9/11. I wanted them to be confronted with masses, with voids, with bodies, with a cavern, with the memory of the towers, with the train, with the firefighters, with the feeling that a historical catastrophe can never be reduced to the image by which it became famous. They had to be left with the responsibility of making the connections.

This responsibility of observation is essential throughout the Abode of Chaos. I have often observed that those arriving for the first time instinctively seek instructions.

Where is the beginning?

Which direction should we visit?

What does this work mean?

Whose portrait is this? Why this phrase?

What is the connection between this alchemical symbol and this geopolitical image?

But the Abode of Chaos is not structured like a manual. It is much closer to a mental space. One can enter it from different points and construct different paths. This open architecture does not mean that everything is arbitrary. On the contrary, behind the appearance of disorder lies an extremely rigorous organization of signs, recurrences, axes, and grand, sculptural gestures. But this order is not necessarily meant to be immediately apparent to the visitor. It must be something that can be discovered.

This is precisely what Ground Zero had begun to produce. The cavern didn't need a plaque saying, "This is the opposition to the towers." The visitor could sense it before articulating it. The weight of the materials didn't need to be immediately translated into tons. The body understood that it was standing before a real mass. The rail didn't need to impose a single reference point; its presence opened up multiple historical memories. The firefighters didn't need to become edifying statues; their movement was enough to recall that extraordinary reversal of human instinct: rising when everyone else is descending.

It was there that I perhaps best understood what it means to embody a thought. As long as an idea depends on its explanation, it remains bound to the one who utters it. When it becomes space, matter, rhythm, proportion, relation, it acquires a far stranger possibility of transmission. Someone can receive it without knowing your vocabulary. They can even receive it against you. They can interpret it differently and yet be genuinely affected by the structure you have produced. This seems to me much closer to true transmission than obedience to a doctrine.

Here I found again what I had just understood with Sydney. To transmit does not mean to produce a copy. To give a work to the viewer is also to accept that they will never become your intellectual copy of it. They must make of it something that belongs to them.

At that moment, the gaze of the witnesses became an integral part of Ground Zero. The word "witness" has several meanings here. There were those who had been direct or indirect witnesses of September 11, those who had received the images like all of us, those who had known people present in New York, and those who had simply lived through those days in front of the news.

Then there were the witnesses to the construction site: the companions, the family, the friends, those who had seen the work before it became what a visitor would now discover. Finally, there was the witness in the almost legal sense of the term: the one whose presence attests that something took place.

This concept touches me deeply because it connects to all my work on archives.

What is an archive, if not a device for deferred testimony?

A photograph says: this has been seen.

A sales catalogue states: this work was there, on such and such a date, in such and such a sale, with such and such an attribution and such and such a price.

A file, a magnetic tape, a film, an aerial photograph, a legal document are all means of combating the complete disappearance of an event.

The Abode of Chaos belongs to this same economy of the trace, but uses matter as an archive. Ground Zero said: this event has traversed our time and it has traversed this place. Not in the form of a neutral document, but in that of a plastic transformation. The difference is important.

A documentary archive ideally seeks to preserve information. The work also preserves a disruption. It retains the way in which an event disorganized and then reorganized a perception.

This is probably why some works become historical witnesses even when they are not strictly documentary. Guernica does not inform us like a military report about the bombing of Guernica. It preserves something else: the violence of the rupture as it permeated Picasso and his era. Goya does not give us an administrative record of the massacres. He conveys to us a certain truth of the body in the face of war.

I am obviously not comparing Ground Zero to these works to establish an aesthetic hierarchy; I am speaking of function. Art can preserve what factual data alone cannot convey: the inner form of a shock.

That was precisely our challenge. And that's why the visitor's silence held more value for me than any demonstration. It sometimes indicated that the work had created this suspension where information becomes experience again. We had started with screens that never stopped talking. Ground Zero now produced an interruption. This required noise: the sound of metal, tools, machinery, companions, conversations. But the result could be silent.

I like this reversal. The noise of the construction site gives birth to the silence of the artwork. As if all the energy expended in making it had to finally disappear so that something else could appear.

It is also a lesson in humility for the creator. You have lived for months immersed in the intensity of a project, and the person who comes after knows nothing of it. They owe you no expectation of appreciating your efforts. The work is no more valuable because you slept little, because it weighs tens of tons, because an accident occurred, or because the companions worked on it. All these factors belong to its genesis, and I want to present them because they reveal the human reality of its construction. But they can never become arguments intended to compel the viewer to admire.

The work must stand on its own without accounting for the suffering that produced it. This separation is fundamental. The work deserves respect; it does not guarantee its accuracy.

Only time will tell what a work truly becomes in the consciousness of others. That's where another temporality begins, much longer than that of the construction site. As soon as the first visitors saw Ground Zero, the work entered the memory of people I didn't know.

Some would talk about it. Some would photograph it. Others would return. Journalists would place it in different narratives. Opponents of the Abode of Chaos might see in it further proof of what they rejected about the place. Art historians might read genealogies there that I hadn't considered. Children would walk through it without knowing exactly what 9/11 was. In time, a generation would emerge for whom the 2001 attacks would no longer be a personal memory but an event studied as I myself had studied events prior to my birth.

This prospect already captivated me.

What becomes of a work of art when the trauma from which it originates passes from lived memory to historical memory?

Do its signs change meaning?

Does the cave remain the same when one does not remember seeing the towers fall live?

Does the firefighter remain an immediately recognizable figure?

Does the railway open up other associations?

The work does not provide definitive answers to these questions. It explores them.

This is also why I have never considered the Abode of Chaos as a monument frozen in a specific era. It accumulates layers. Ground Zero was going to become a fundamental layer, but other events would soon be inscribed alongside it: Afghanistan, Iraq, Madrid, London, Paris, the Middle East, financial crises, wars, revolutions, whistleblowers, technological transformations, new powers, new fractures.

The world was no longer going to leave us with any doubt about what we had begun to understand in September 2001: History was not over. On the contrary, it had just entered a phase of acceleration where world events, images and their circulation on networks would become more and more intimately linked.

Ground Zero was our first major confrontation with this new condition. It had transformed the Abode of Chaos. Before it, the place already possessed its alchemical, scientific, and symbolic matrices, its will to make space a thought. After it, an additional function became irreversible: the Abode of Chaos would also be a seismograph.

I use this word precisely. A seismograph does not cause earthquakes. Nor does it explain them. It records a vibration, gives it a trace, and then allows us to read its intensity, duration, and aftershocks.

This image perfectly reflects what I wanted the Abode of Chaos to become in the face of global geopolitics. Not a tribunal handing out praise and blame, much less a propaganda machine, but a body extremely sensitive to the upheavals of its time. The walls, the portraits, the sculptures, the symbols, the archives could record these upheavals and connect them.

This is where the horizon of the next part began to take shape. Ground Zero wasn't the culmination of the Abode of Chaos's relationship to History. It was its threshold. After 9/11, geopolitics could no longer be just another reference point. It would become of the threshold from which the work would begin. Events would strike the place almost in real time.

But this transformation would be meaningless if it made us lose what the thirty-six hours without news had taught us at the beginning: behind every event there are people. A geopolitics that forgets bodies becomes a strategist's abstraction.

A geopolitical art that forgets the body becomes a cartography of misfortune. It was necessary to preserve the human element in all future layers. The great names, the heads of state, the terrorists, the whistleblowers, the victims, the opponents, the journalists, the artists would appear on the walls, but never as the flat pieces of a grand power game.

Each person carries a life, a causality, a responsibility, sometimes a tragedy. This is what Ground Zero taught us before any theory. We started with the towers. We found humanity again.

Perhaps that, ultimately, is what the silence of the witnesses was telling me. Faced with a catastrophe, language first constructs immense systems: war, terrorism, civilization, religion, West, East, security. Then a work of art, if it manages not to be crushed by its own symbols, can lead the viewer in the other direction, back to the individual body.

A man falls.

A firefighter is coming up.

Several photographers remained silent for thirty-six hours.

A young man grows up near concrete.

A companion is holding a coin.

One eye is injured.

A person enters a cave and remains silent.

Between the first image of 9/11 and this silence, perhaps the whole of Ground Zero lies in this movement: restoring to History its human gravity.

So I had nothing to add when visitors stood before the artwork. The explanation would have come too late and too soon at the same time. Too late because the encounter had already taken place. Too soon because they hadn't yet finished processing what they had just seen.

This timeframe had to be respected. I watched the faces, the pauses, the movements, sometimes someone stepping back to take in a larger scene, someone approaching a detail, someone saying nothing. And for once, I wasn't trying to fill the space with words. The construction site had spoken loudly enough. History had spoken with a violence no one could forget. Baudrillard, Fukuyama, the newspapers, the governments, the analysts would continue to speak for a long time. I needed to know if the material could hold out for a few seconds without them. It did.

In front of Ground Zero, the artwork began to live in the eyes of those who discovered it. I could finally step back. In the ensuing silence, something far greater than the sculpture became perceptible. 9/11 hadn't just opened a wound in New York. It had opened a new chamber of the world for the Abode of Chaos. We didn't yet know its dimensions or its future occupants. We only knew that it would remain open.

And into this room would soon enter Afghanistan, Iraq, Madrid, London, Paris, asymmetric wars, the Middle East, Gaza, Hormuz and all these upheavals by which the 21st century would confirm, year after year, what Ground Zero had taught us in the crash and then in the silence: History had not returned for a day. It was coming to reclaim its place.