Thierry entrusted me with the thread of his thought and his memories; I convey their essence in writing. The ‘I’ that follows carries his experience and his words as they unfolded in our dialogue.

— Isis

There are images in the Abode of Chaos that I cannot look at like the others. They do not simply represent an event. They represent a moment when a city I know, a person I knew, a professional world to which I belong, or a generation in which I recognize myself was struck. Madrid.

London.

Paris.

Three European capitals. Three terrorist attacks.

Three moments when terrorism understands that it is no longer necessary to attack a presidential palace, a general staff or a military installation to strike a state.

It is enough to disrupt the ordinary flow of people.

A train. A subway. A newsroom. A terrace. A concert hall.

It is precisely this transformation that I wanted to include in The Abode of Chaos.

I never wanted to do geopolitics like one comments on a map from an office.

I paint it when it enters bodies.

I paint it when it changes a face.

I paint it when a photograph suddenly contains more History than a long diplomatic communiqué.

And Madrid was one of those moments.

I know Spain intimately. That is probably also why the Madrid attacks affected me with such particular force.

On March 11, 2004, commuter trains became a battleground. What strikes me about this type of attack is precisely the banality of the target. People don't go to war.

They are going to work.

They take the train.

They are still in the daily morning rehearsal routine.

Then, in a matter of seconds, History enters the train car.

This is how I interpret a part of contemporary terrorism: transforming the ordinary into a threat. Making the man who takes his train the next day wonder, even for a fraction of a second, if the train is still simply a train.

Madrid therefore produced several paintings in the Abode of Chaos. I did not want to reduce this attack to its human toll or to the names of those who had organized it. I wanted to preserve the Spanish wound. Because I often see a dual action at play. The attack kills at the moment of the explosion. Then it seeks to permanently alter society's perception of its own space.

The station is no longer quite the station.

The train is no longer quite the train.

An abandoned bag is no longer quite a bag.

It is this second explosion, the mental one, that terrorism seeks. And that is where geopolitics begins.

Madrid obviously cannot be separated from the war in Iraq, the choices of the Spanish government at the time, the jihadist networks and the fact that the attack took place three days before the Spanish general elections, with immediate political consequences.

But if I were only to explain this, I would write a treatise. Yet The Abode of Chaos does something else. It preserves the moment when this abstract strategy encounters a European body. It transforms geopolitics into a tangible memory.

Then comes London. And there, an image haunts me.

Liza Pulman, a cell phone from that era, a tunnel, almost no light. She films what happens after the explosion. The footage is technically rudimentary, and that's precisely what makes it extraordinary. Shapes are discernible: heads seem to float in the darkness, silhouettes move toward an uncertain light. When you watch these images without knowing their context, they become almost fantastical. You could imagine a procession, a scene from science fiction, almost ghosts.

But the reality is infinitely more striking. The phone doesn't have the imaging capabilities we consider normal today. There's practically no light. The survivors move forward with what they have. With lamps they search for a way out. The device poorly captures bodies; it mainly records the points of light surrounding them.

It is the legend that transforms the image.

I care deeply about this phrase.

Because it explains exactly one of the problems that has always fascinated me in the geopolitical image.

This sequence reminds me that an image is not necessarily limited to what it shows: what we know of its context also transforms our perspective.

Remove the legend.

Remove the date.

Remove London.

Remove the subway.

Remove the attack.

And the image changes completely in nature.

Submit this information.

Suddenly, these forms, which seemed almost unreal, become human beings again, simply trying to get out of a tunnel alive. It's an extraordinary lesson in imagery. And that's why I included it in The Abode of Chaos. In large format.

In the visitor's space. I wanted them to be able to receive the image first before possibly possessing all the keys to understanding it. Let him come closer.

Let him ask himself what he is looking at.

Then knowledge will transform his perspective.

That's exactly what the Abode of Chaos has always done. It doesn't give away all the legends. Sometimes it forces you to search for them. This is how I conceive of the Total Work of Art: it seeks to question rather than to provoke.

This image of London raises questions because it lies precisely between vision and knowledge. And around it were the political figures of the time.

Tony Blair, in particular, whom I painted as I painted so many leaders caught up in the decisions that would transform the beginning of the 21st century.

Opus IX, Revelation, also includes Tony Blair in its iconographic corpus, amidst numerous political and geopolitical figures of that period. This juxtaposition of leaders and events is fundamental to the writing of The Abode of Chaos: it does not artificially separate those who make the decisions from what History subsequently produces in the streets.

Then comes Paris.

And now, I can no longer speak in exactly the same way. Because Paris entered the Abode of Chaos through a much closer wound.

Charlie Hebdo first.

Charlie was not for me the abstract name of a newspaper that became an international symbol after a massacre.

Charlie had talked about us.

The newspaper had devoted a significant piece to the Abode of Chaos, a double-page spread that had deeply affected me. So there was a connection.

Faces, men, a freedom of expression.

One way of considering that drawing could be an intellectual weapon precisely because it refused to ask permission to displease. When the newsroom was massacred, I didn't just watch the news scroll across a screen. I watched men disappear whose faces were already part of my cultural landscape.

I painted them.

Each.

And the Abode of Chaos absorbed Charlie.

Not like a funerary monument. Like a memory.

The cover "All is forgiven" belongs to this memory. It condenses something extraordinarily difficult to explain.

After the assassination, respond with another drawing.

After the violence, continue publishing.

After attempting to impose silence, immediately reintroduce the image. That's exactly what interests me about cultural resistance. It doesn't always consist of responding to force with more force. Sometimes it consists of continuing precisely what the other wanted to stop. Then Paris was struck again.

November 13th.

The Bataclan.

The terraces.

This time, the proximity becomes almost unbearable.

I have belonged to the world of images for decades.

Computer graphics. Production. Directing. Pre-production. Digital creation.

And when I start looking at the people killed at the Bataclan, I discover a professional and cultural generation that I know. Creators. Directors. Graphic designers. People in the visual arts. People in the cultural sector. People who could have joined our companies, worked with our teams, come to the Abode of Chaos. I then made a strange decision. I began to write their biographies. More than eighty.

I don't even know exactly, even today, why I felt this obligation so strongly. Perhaps because to assess the casualties is the ultimate form of dehumanization.

"90 dead."

"130 dead."

A number.

One line.

Then the next news item.

I didn't want that. I wanted to put lives back behind the numbers. A first name.

A profession.

A passion.

A photograph.

A family.

An interrupted trajectory.

Terrorism produces statistics. Memory must restore the people.

Many families helped me. Very few refused. Some thanked me with a warmth that moved me deeply.

I obviously had no moral right to impose this memory. When a family didn't want it, I respected that. But when relatives accepted it, I tried to give back to their child, their brother, their sister, their partner, their friend something that the word "victim" destroys almost immediately: their individuality.

And then there was Lola. Her father, whom I knew professionally, asked me after her death at the Bataclan to paint her portrait. I want to emphasize this point: I would never have dared to take her face and transform it into a work of art without his request. He entrusted it to me. So I painted her.

Lola has entered the Abode of Chaos. She has entered our catalogues. She has entered this memory that visitors will continue to look at long after the news channels have stopped broadcasting her face.

That is what a geopolitical work means to me.

Not to paint Emmanuel Macron, George Bush, Tony Blair or Saddam Hussein and consider that one has represented power.

Power can also be seen on the face of the one who is subjected to it. Geopolitics doesn't exist only in palaces.

It arrives one evening at a concert hall.

It walks past a young girl.

It destroys a family.

Then it enters a courtroom.

That's why I also wanted to preserve the transcripts of the trial. A friend, a writer and seasoned reporter, had covered the hearings. I collected sentences. Short sentences. Raw. Sometimes unbearable. Those of the witnesses, the police officers, the investigators, the people who had entered the room.

I wrote them down. Not to create horror. I hate the aesthetics of self-indulgence. But because some sentences possess a documentary density that no image can replace.

A witness statement can encapsulate an entire room. A statement from a police officer can convey what no photograph should ever show. Then the words, too, entered the Abode of Chaos.

This is where we understand what I call a plastic news agency. I don't take a news item to illustrate it. I extract several regimes of traces from the event.

The face of the politician, that of the victim, a photograph taken with a phone, a witness statement, a title, a map, a date, sometimes the image of a corpse. Then I make them coexist.

It is the neighborhood that produces meaning. Exactly like in Najaf and Qom.

The Abode of Chaos is not an encyclopedia where each event has its own entry. It functions like a rhizome.

Madrid responds to London.

London responds to Paris.

Paris refers to 9/11.

Charlie Hebdo refers to freedom of expression.

The Bataclan is a reminder of the external war that has returned to the civilian space of Europe.

The photograph of the London tunnel refers back to my entire reflection on evidence and legend.

Lola abruptly brings us back to the question that all geopolitics eventually encounters: What is a decision made thousands of kilometers away when it reaches the body of a child or young adult?

This is where I reject disembodied geopolitics.

We can talk about the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, jihadist networks, military doctrines, intelligence services, borders, and financial flows. All of this is necessary. I do it in this book. But if, in the end, no one has a face, we have lost half of reality.

Madrid, London and Paris taught me something else.

Early 21st-century terrorism possesses an extraordinary awareness of image. It knows that physical explosions are no longer enough. We need to produce a global image.

A replication.

A loop.

A contagious fear.

The attack now occupies two spaces: the place where it occurs, and the network where it is endlessly reproduced. This is why I work so much with images. I refuse to let the image belong solely to the perpetrator of the violence.

I take it up again. I move it. I compare it to other images. I transform it into an archive. This is an essential operation.

The terrorist wants to project an image of power.

The artist can take this image and place it in a story where this power is questioned, contextualized, sometimes turned against the one who wanted to impose it.

The Abode of Chaos then becomes a machine of counter-memory. It erases nothing. It does not forgive in place of the victims. It does not judge in place of the court. It preserves. It connects. It questions. And that's probably why foreign journalists are sometimes stunned when they come here. They find their own history. Not just the global figures everyone knows. They can recognize a face that, for them, holds a very specific national significance. They then understand that the Abode of Chaos hasn't simply followed the major Western headlines.

It observed the ramifications. The supporting roles that sometimes become the leading ones.

The victims, the religious figures, the opponents, the military, the journalists, the dead.

It is this accumulated work that allows me to write these geopolitical chapters today. I don't discover Madrid, London, or Paris by opening Wikipedia to write a book. I rediscover images that I chose twenty years ago.

Walls that I painted.

Faces I've passed thousands of times.

Dead people to whom I tried to give a name.

Families I spoke with.

Geopolitics had already entered my studio. And that's where the essential difference lies. I didn't just analyze the tragic return of History to Europe. I inscribed it within the very fabric of the Abode of Chaos.

Madrid. London. Paris. Three cities. But on my walls, they are no longer separate. They form a single question.

How can a democracy continue to exist when fear seeks to transform each of its ordinary actions into a threat?

Taking the train, taking the subway, drawing, having a drink, listening to music.

The answer lies not only in intelligence services, anti-terrorism laws, or military operations. It also lies in a society's ability to continue. Continue taking the subway.

Continue drawing.

Continue going to the concert.

Keep watching.

Keep creating.

And to continue giving a face to those whom terrorism sought to reduce to a mere number. That is what I wanted to do. To transform shock into memory, and memory into resistance.