When I look at Iraq, I never see just a political map. I see a much older, much deeper geography, where holy cities, religious lineages, theological schools, war memories, tribes, oil, and the borders produced by modern history overlap to the point of rendering almost illegible what the West conveniently calls "Iraq." That is precisely why I painted Iraq.

Not just its wars.

At the Abode of Chaos, the leaders of the Middle East didn't come after the fact to illustrate a geopolitical analysis. They constitute the analysis itself. For years, I've been bringing into the walls the men who embody the world's fractures. Some are well-known. Others are almost unknown to the Western public. But I never choose them based on their fame. I choose them because, at a specific moment, they occupy a pivotal position in History. That's exactly what happened with Iraqi Shiism.

The Western mistake is often to view Iraq through a few immediately visible oppositions: Saddam Hussein versus the United States; Sunnis versus Shiites; Baghdad versus Washington; and then insurgency versus occupation. All of this exists. But if we dig deeper, another question arises.

Which of Najaf or Qom will impose its conception of Shiite power in a lasting way?

I deliberately called it the War of the Two Vaticans. The expression is obviously Western. It doesn't claim to reduce Shiism to the Catholic structure. It allows the reader to understand that beyond state borders exist two centers of religious and intellectual authority whose rivalry permeates the entire region. And it is precisely this invisible geography that I wanted to inscribe in The Abode of Chaos.

On the walls and even in my offices, faces gaze at one another. This device is essential. I didn't just want to paint a portrait of Moqtada al-Sadr because his name appeared in the news reports. I wanted his face to exist in a relationship. Alongside another face. In a tension. Because History is never a collection of portraits. It is the relationship between them.

Moqtada al-Sadr belongs to a religious dynasty struck by the violence of the Ba'athist regime. His father, Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, was assassinated in 1999. The son gradually became one of the key figures in post-Saddam Iraq, with his popular presence in the vast Shiite area of Baghdad that would become known as Sadr City.

But facing him is another authority. Older. More silent. A different temporality of religious power. Ali al-Sistani.

And this is where Iraq becomes infinitely more interesting than the simplistic narrative of an American occupation. Because the two men represent neither the same age, nor the same strategy, nor the same relationship to the people, nor exactly the same conception of religious and political authority. It is this tension that I wanted to make visible.

Opus IX, Revelation, materially preserves this method of constructing geopolitics through proximity: the sequence devoted to this part of The Abode of Chaos notably links Ali Khamenei and Moqtada al-Sadr, following the portraits of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ruhollah Khomeini, and preceding Saddam Hussein and his hanging. It is not a catalog of personalities. It is a cartography. The viewer moves from one face to another and, if they possess the necessary understanding, grasps that the borders of Iran and Iraq do not in any way impede the flow of religion, memory, and power.

Najaf belongs to Iraq. Qom belongs to Iran. But religious authority doesn't stop at the border. That's why I speak of invisible geography. The administrative map shows two states. The real map shows networks of authority, schools, families, pilgrimages, funding, influence, and memories that cross the border.

And between the two lies Basra. Basra is not an appendage to the south of the map. It is a keystone. It opens onto the Gulf. It faces Iran. It bears the memory of the Iran-Iraq War. It lies near the Shatt al-Arab. It belongs to a region where oil, religion, maritime geography, and the legacies of war converge. When I look at Basra, I therefore see simultaneously the city, the oil, the maritime access, the Iranian proximity, and the scars of successive wars.

This is precisely how the Abode of Chaos operates. There, an image almost never has a single interpretation. The portrait is an entry point. Behind the face lies a genealogy. Behind the genealogy, a war. Behind the war, a religion. Behind the religion, sometimes a border. And behind the border, almost always a memory older than the state that claims to contain it.

That's why Saddam Hussein obviously had to be there. But not just Saddam alive. The Abode of Chaos preserves Saddam across multiple timelines. There's the man of power. The dictator. The warlord. And then the accused.

I was particularly drawn to that extraordinary scene where Saddam, before his tribunal, points his index finger at the judge. This gesture encapsulates almost the entire tragedy of the character. He is no longer the absolute ruler of Iraq. He is an accused man. But his body continues to speak like that of a man in command.

Then comes the other image. The last one. Saddam moments before his hanging. A clandestine image, produced under the terrible conditions of his execution, which would almost immediately go viral. Opus IX, Revelation, explicitly retains this dual presence: “Saddam Hussein” then “The Hanging of Saddam Hussein.”

That's precisely what my work as a seismograph is all about. I don't just paint the man as the world observes him. I follow his trajectory until the moment power leaves his body. Sometimes even to his remains. Because the remains themselves can become geopolitical.

The corpse of a leader is not necessarily the end of his symbolic power.

He could become a martyr.

Humiliation. Proof. Propaganda. Place of pilgrimage. Object of revenge.

History sometimes continues to use the dead. That's also why the Abode of Chaos should never be reduced to a gallery of portraits. A gallery displays faces. I build relationships.

When Khomeini appeared, it wasn't simply the face of the founder of the Islamic Republic. Behind him lay his exile, his return to Iran, the 1979 revolution, and the complete transformation of the regional balance of power. When Khamenei appeared, it was another layer of the same system. When Ahmadinejad appeared, yet another.

When Moqtada al-Sadr enters this constellation, Iraq and Iran cease to be viewed as two separate histories. And when Saddam appears next, the entire memory of the Iran-Iraq War returns with him. That is why spatial order matters. That is why neighborhoods matter. That is why the place where I place a portrait is never entirely insignificant.

The Abode of Chaos is a cosa mentale before it is a painted surface. I know what I'm relating. And the visitor may not immediately possess all the clues. That's okay. The work is meant to question, not provoke. They might see two men. Feel a tension. Then later learn who they were. At that moment, the wall is reactivated in their memory.

This is probably one of the reasons why foreign journalists react so strongly when they come to the Abode of Chaos. They arrive from their own countries. They think they know their own history. Then, around a corner, they encounter someone they absolutely did not expect to meet here. Sometimes a figure that even some of their compatriots have forgotten.

And suddenly they understand that the Abode of Chaos didn't only look at their country when CNN, Reuters, AFP, or the major Western media outlets put it in the news. It followed its fault lines.

That's what I did with Iraq. That's what I did with Iran. With Lebanon. With Ukraine. With Russia. With China. With the Arab world.

Opus IX, Revelation, already provides impressive documentary evidence of this. In just a few pages of its iconographic index appear Tony Blair, Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Pervez Musharraf, Abdul Qadeer Khan, Youssef al-Qaradawi, Hosni Mubarak, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hassan al-Banna, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ruhollah Khomeini, Ali Khamenei, Moqtada al-Sadr, and Saddam Hussein. This proximity is my geopolitical writing.

This needs to be understood in order to understand this chapter. I can write twenty pages about Najaf and Qom. But if I don't tell the reader that these men are already on my walls, that I have looked at them for years, that I have chosen their images and sometimes the precise second of their existence that I wanted to preserve, then half of my argument is missing.

I didn't arrive at this geopolitics to write this book. I painted it. I inscribed it. I embedded it in the steel, the rust, the walls, the offices, the corridors of the Abode of Chaos. And I often did so at the very moment when History was still unfolding.

This is where the concept of a seismograph becomes truly meaningful. A seismograph doesn't judge the earthquake. It records its waves. The Abode of Chaos functions in the same way. It captures. It records. Then it preserves. But unlike a neutral archive, it also builds relationships.

This is where the author comes in. I choose to have two faces in dialogue. I choose to have an image of power meet an image of downfall. I choose to have a living man sometimes accompanied by a representation of his death. I choose to present war not as a succession of military communiqués but as a circulation of gazes, beliefs, bodies, and memories.

Najaf versus Qom is therefore not, for me, a specialist's formula. It is a tension that I have materialized. And this tension allows us to understand why the post-Saddam era could never be reduced to the question: will the Americans win or lose the war?

The question was much deeper. Once the Ba'athist regime was destroyed, what order would fill the void?

Which religious authority?

What is the conception of political Shiism?

What is the relationship with Iran?

What role for the popular networks of Moqtada al-Sadr?

What authority do the leading religious figures of Najaf have?

What role for Qom?

What is the relationship between the sanctuary, the street, the state, and the militia?

This is the real battle.

The visible battle involved the use of armored vehicles.

The invisible battle was using time.

And I have always believed that Western powers understood the former much better than the latter. Because we have a tendency to measure power by what is immediately visible.

A president. An army. A parliament. A border.

However, in the Middle East, a considerable part of the power may exist elsewhere.

In a sanctuary. In a family. In a religious school. In a memory. In a street. In the portrait of a martyr.

In a moral authority that officially owns no tanks.

Najaf and Qom are two invisible capitals.

And that's precisely why they had to enter the Abode of Chaos. Because my work has never been about painting only those who govern. I want to paint those who make History happen, even when they're not in the presidential palace.

Then geopolitics ceases to be a treaty. It becomes again what it has always been for me: a way of looking at the people who bear the fault lines of the world. And the Abode of Chaos becomes what it has been from the beginning: the skin on which these fractures are inscribed.