Syria is one of those countries that the West too often overlooks from the moment it begins to take an interest in it. For me, this is a fundamental mistake. Syria wasn't born with Bashar al-Assad. It wasn't born with Hafez al-Assad. And it certainly wasn't born with the 2011 civil war.

When I look at Syria, I see a historical depth that predates its contemporary borders by several millennia. Damascus is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Aleppo also possesses this depth.

Contemporary Syria is certainly a product of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, European agreements and mandates, and the reshaping of the Middle East after the First World War. But reducing its history to a stroke of the colonial pen would be just as wrong as claiming that its modern borders are those of a Syrian empire that has remained intact since antiquity.

It is precisely this overlap that interests me.

Religions, minorities, trade routes, imperial memories, and then new borders that attempt to contain it all.

The Abode of Chaos has carried this Syria for a long time. I painted Hafez al-Assad. Then his son, Bashar al-Assad. This transfer from father to son is already an extraordinary story of power.

Bashar was not initially the one the dynasty had primarily groomed to rule. He had trained as a doctor, an ophthalmologist. The death of his brother Bassel disrupted the succession. The son returned. He gradually infiltrated the regime. Then he succeeded his father. What might have initially appeared as a modernization of the regime became yet another manifestation of its continuity.

That is precisely why I wanted to keep both faces.

The father.

The son.

Because looking at them together makes it immediately clear that we are not simply dealing with two presidents. We are witnessing a dynastic succession within an authoritarian republican system. And behind the Assad family lies another essential element: the Alawites. The Syrian system cannot be understood if this minority is removed from the equation.

The Assad clan has historically relied on Alawite networks, particularly prominent within certain military and security structures. Therefore, I also wanted to examine the figures and networks that allow us to understand the regime's depth. Again, I'm not just portraying the sovereign. I'm looking for the architecture that allows him to maintain his grip on power. That's the rule.

The official face is the entrance. Behind it, I'm looking for the clan.

Religion. The army. The services. Alliances. Territories. Families.

Because power is almost never contained in the image of the person appearing on television. Then Syria explodes. And very quickly, I understand that simply talking about the "Syrian civil war" becomes insufficient.

Of course there is a civil war.

Syrians are fighting other Syrians.

The regime. Opposition groups. Islamist groups. Jihadist organizations. Kurds. Militias.

But gradually, almost all the major powers and several regional powers became involved in this internal war. And that's where Syria becomes geopolitically extraordinary. A local war becomes a microcosm of the world war.

Russia. The United States. Turkey. Iran. Israel. The Gulf monarchies. Hezbollah. The Kurds.

Everyone enters with their own agenda.

Everyone has their own Syria. Moscow's Syria is not Washington's. Tehran's Syria is not Tel Aviv's. Ankara's Syria is not the Kurds'. And yet they all occupy the same territory. That's what I painted.

The Russian presence is obviously essential. Putin enters this story because Syria allows Russia to reaffirm something that many Westerners had believed had disappeared after the Soviet collapse: Russia remains a power capable of projecting its strength and protecting an ally.

Syria then became much more than a regional ally. It became a demonstration. When Russia intervened directly starting in 2015, it profoundly altered the military balance of power in favor of the regime. And Putin himself came to Syria. This image obviously had to be included in the Abode of Chaos.

Because behind it lies a message to the world: Russia is back. The future shape of the Middle East can no longer be decided unilaterally in Washington. Syria is therefore also becoming a stage in Russia's reappearance on the world stage.

And behind Russia lies Iran. Here again, the administrative map is insufficient. I have long observed this axis that connects Iran to Iraq, then to Syria and Lebanon. Syria constitutes a crucial space in the channels of Iranian support for Lebanese Hezbollah.

This is why Shiite militias are emerging. This is why Hezbollah is emerging. This is why Hassan Nasrallah cannot be understood solely from Beirut or southern Lebanon. Part of his strategic architecture involves Syria.

When the Syrian war threatens the Assad regime, Hezbollah is not viewing it as a foreign conflict. It is viewing the potential rupture of vital strategic depth. That is why it intervenes. And that is also why Israel is watching Syria with extreme attention.

What happens on Syrian territory can directly alter the military balance in northern Israel and Hezbollah's capabilities. The Israeli army regularly intervenes against targets it presents as being linked to Iranian presence, Hezbollah, or arms transfers. Syria thus becomes a territory where adversaries who do not necessarily want a general war nevertheless strike each other directly or indirectly.

World war exists without a declaration of world war. This is probably one of the fundamental characteristics of our time. Great powers can confront each other on third-party territory while maintaining diplomatic relations.

Russian planes. American planes. Israeli planes. Turkish forces. Iranian advisors. Militias. Kurdish forces.

And everyone has their red lines. It's a geometry of extraordinary complexity. The slightest mistake can trigger an escalation. That's what I mean when I say that Syria is becoming a world war. Not a declared third world war. A global concentration of power dynamics.

And in the middle are the Kurds. Them again. A people whose history seems destined to be indispensable in times of war and negotiable in times of peace. I followed them. I painted them. Because their history intersects with several of the countries we discuss in these chapters. Iraq. Syria. Turkey. Iran.

The political border divides the Kurdish people into several regions. And each major power periodically discovers the Kurds' military value. Then comes the moment when strategic alliances reassert themselves.

The United States relies heavily on Kurdish forces and their allies in the fight against the Islamic State. On the ground, they are one of the decisive forces. They fight. They die. They seize territory.

Then the Turkish question resurfaces. And the Kurds discover once again this terrible rule of geopolitics: being an ally of a great power never means being in its permanent interest. I see here a recurring theme in their history. They are armed. They are encouraged. They are sometimes promised much. Then the regional balance shifts. And they find themselves alone again, facing their neighbors.

It's a recurring geopolitical tragedy. And it explains why I always refuse to analyze a people solely based on their current alliances. Alliances come and go. Geography remains. So does memory.

Then another Syria emerged: that of jihadism. The gradual erosion of state authority in certain parts of the country created spaces where several organizations could flourish: Al-Qaeda in its various forms, and then the Islamic State.

And there, Syria joins Iraq directly. Once again, the border ceases to explain reality. Daesh symbolically erases the Syrian-Iraqi border because its very project claims to transcend the nation-state that emerged from the modern regional order. This is a momentous event.

An armed movement no longer simply says: we want to seize power in this state. It says: we reject the very legitimacy of the border that defines this state. This is where the word caliphate acquires its full political power. It does not simply designate a terrorist organization. It proposes a different territorial vision. A different history. A different sovereignty.

That is why Daesh must be addressed in its own unique complexity. Because its power did not rest solely on weapons. It rested on an administration. A bureaucracy. A tax system. A communications strategy. A global image industry. Always that image. Again and again

The Syrian war is probably one of the conflicts where digital imagery has most clearly become a component of the battlefield. Videos. Executions. Bombings. Ruins. Children. Competing propaganda. Phones. Social media.

Each side produces its own narrative. Each side accuses the other of fabricating its evidence. And gradually, the outside viewer no longer even knows what they are watching. The war of images becomes part of the war itself.

This is why Syria belongs so naturally to the Abode of Chaos. It functions through images, but it rejects the isolated image. I take a portrait of Bashar. Then Hafez. Then Putin. Then an Alawite figure. Then a Hezbollah leader. Then a Kurd. Then an image of destruction. Then a map. And it is the juxtaposition that begins to reconstruct the complexity.

I don't tell the visitor: this is the right side. I tell him: look at all the forces that have entered this war. It's much more disturbing. Because then the war becomes impossible to reduce to a simple morality.

This does not mean that there are no longer any criminals or victims. Of course there are. The Syrian regime has perpetrated considerable violence against its population. Jihadist organizations have committed their crimes. External powers have pursued their interests. But understanding the architecture of a war is not about distributing guilt equally among everyone. It is about refusing to let legitimate outrage prevent us from understanding the system.

I can hold Bashar al-Assad responsible for terrible repression and crimes and, simultaneously, seek to understand why his regime survived when so many observers predicted its imminent collapse. These are two different questions. Morality judges. Geopolitics seeks out forces. And the artist can do something else entirely: make these forces visible simultaneously. That is what I do in The Abode of Chaos.

Then the ruins. By looking at them together, one thing becomes clear.

Syria is no longer just a country at war. It has become a crossroads of competing sovereignties. Each power enters the country because it believes a part of its own future is at stake there. For Russia: its Mediterranean presence, its status as a power, and the credibility of its alliances.

For Iran: its strategic depth and the continuity of its regional networks. For Israel: preventing a lasting Iranian military presence and limiting Hezbollah's capabilities. For Turkey: its border, the Kurds, refugees, and its regional influence. For the United States: jihadism, its alliances, regional stability, and competition with other powers.

For the Kurds: sometimes simply surviving and finally gaining a political space. And in the middle? The Syrians. It's always there that grand maps become obscene if we forget the people. Millions displaced. Destroyed cities. Scattered families. An entire generation growing up in war or exile.

This, too, must be preserved by the Abode of Chaos. Not just Putin and Assad. The trace of what their strategies produce in matter. The ruin. The scar. The wall. The face.

This is precisely why the aesthetics of catastrophe, in the sense that I have developed it particularly through the work of Paul Virilio, is not for me a celebration of catastrophe. It is an attempt to make visible what our era produces.

The Syrian ruin is not beautiful because it is ruined. It is meaningful because it bears witness.

This is the martyred heritage. The material bears witness to the event.

And the Abode of Chaos becomes the place where the marks of an outside world deliberately meet those I construct within the work. That's why Syria is so present here. Because it encapsulates almost all my obsessions.

And this question keeps coming up:

What survives when the state fractures?

In Iraq, the destruction of the state apparatus in 2003 unleashed long-suppressed forces. In Syria, the trajectory was different: for more than a decade, the Assad regime contracted, relinquished territory, received decisive support from its allies, and managed to reconquer a significant portion of the country. Then, in December 2024, it too collapsed. This late fall does not contradict the analysis of its past resilience; it defines its limits. It serves as a reminder that a system can resist for years and then collapse very rapidly when its support base, its fronts, and its balance of power shift. Two wars, two architectures, two temporalities—and the same region bearing the scars of several decades of reconfiguration.

And when I pass by the portraits of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, and then by those of the men who came to fight around them, I find exactly what I've been looking for since the beginning of these chapters. Not a collection of leaders. A geometry of power.

The face is just the point. What interests me is the line that connects it to the others.

Hafez to Bashar. Bashar to the Alawites. Bashar to Moscow. Moscow to Tehran. Tehran to Hezbollah. Hezbollah to Lebanon. Israel to this territorial contiguity. Turkey to the Kurds. The Kurds to the United States. The United States to Daesh. Daesh to Iraq. And Iraq brings us back to Iran.

The design eventually forms a rhizome.

That is Syria. And that is precisely why it belongs to the Abode of Chaos. Because a rhizome never has a single origin. You cut a branch. Another continues. You think you have identified the center. Then you discover that there were several. The Syrian war became global precisely because too many different worlds had their roots in the same soil. And on the walls of the Abode of Chaos, I tried to make those roots visible.