I am reconstructing an experience that Thierry alone lived, from his words and from the work of making connections born of our dialogue.

— Isis

Filming the Abode of Chaos has always presented an almost insurmountable problem: how to fit into a frame a work whose very principle is to overflow all frames? A photograph can capture a face, a sculpture, a facade, a trace, a scene. A camera can add movement, sound, duration.

But as soon as one attempts to show the Abode of Chaos itself, the device begins to fail. Something is always missing. The scale is missing, the succession of thresholds, the relationship between the visitor's body and the masses, the smell of metal, the temperature differences, the sensation of being simultaneously in a house, a museum, a ruin, a laboratory, an architectural structure, a materialized database, and a fragment of global geopolitics.

It is precisely this impossibility that made the film necessary.

The aim was not to film in order to replace a visit. It was to film in order to invent another way of engaging with the artwork. This is how 999 came about, directed by Étienne Perrone from an original screenplay I conceived as the author and designer of the project's foundational vision. I never envisioned this film as a documentary. It was not about taking the visitor by the hand and telling them: here is this sculpture, here is this fresco, here is this building. That approach would have immediately reduced the Abode of Chaos to a mere succession of objects with commentary.

But the work is not an inventory. It functions through contamination.

One image should call forth another, one space should alter the interpretation of the previous one, a piece of music should shift an architectural space into a different mode of perception. It was therefore necessary to construct an initiatory passage rather than a guided tour.

The word initiatory may seem weighty if taken in its most conventional mystical sense. I use it here in its simplest sense: a journey where the one who enters is not exactly in the same perceptual state when he emerges.

An initiation does not simply provide information. It changes the way one sees things.

This was the real challenge of 999. The film had to make possible a first mental crossing of the Zone, strong enough for a viewer located several thousand kilometers away to understand that he was not dealing with a local curiosity, nor a post-apocalyptic setting, nor a spectacular accumulation, but with a system.

The shoot was therefore long, much longer than the final runtime would suggest. We worked for about two to three months, during the winter, with a discipline that sometimes resembled that of a film set more than that of an improvised artist's film. There were the tracks, the Betacam, the camera movements, the reshoots, the lighting problems, the framing that had to respect the geometry of the artworks.

Each shot faced a particular difficulty: how to convey density without producing simple saturation?

How to convey the sense of mass without bringing the film to a standstill?

How can we prevent the camera from turning all surfaces into flat images when the location relies precisely on changes in depth?

The camera could easily betray the Abode of Chaos.

This is a question I took very seriously. The image possesses enormous power, but it also possesses a reductive violence. It divides. It decides what is in and what remains off-screen. It creates a hierarchy that physical space does not necessarily impose.

When you are in the Abode of Chaos, your eye may leave a work, look behind, return, go up, go down, hear something that makes you change direction.

The film, for its part, momentarily imposes a gaze. The filmmaker becomes responsible for this constraint. Therefore, the camera movement must open rather than close. I wanted the viewer to feel that there was always more off-screen, that each shot was a fragment of a totality impossible to contain.

Off-screen space plays a large part in 999.

The Abode of Chaos is never fully revealed. It is suggested through excess. No sooner does one form become legible than another appears. The viewer must quickly understand that they will not be able to retain everything. This is intentional. I have always believed that the work should produce an experience of controlled overflow.

We must not be lost because nothing makes sense; we must be overwhelmed because there are too many relationships to grasp them all at once.

The film follows this logic precisely. It does not simplify the chaos; it constructs a navigation within its density. The title itself, 999, belongs to this logic of reversal. Numbers have always interested me because they possess this extraordinary capacity to be both perfectly abstract and extraordinarily symbolically charged.

A number is a mathematical object, but certain cultures, religions, and traditions ascribe additional values to it. 999 immediately possesses a graphic power. It evokes reversibility, symmetry, and invertibility. Depending on how one looks at it, other symbols can emerge.

I like these structures where an element appears stable before a shift in perspective reveals something else.

The entire Abode of Chaos is based on this experience.

It is important to clarify the nature of 999 here. The film is a work of fiction, and part of its language draws on esotericism, alchemy, and initiatory traditions. Its images and correspondences should therefore not be interpreted as literal predictions. The future does not confirm a prophecy; it can retrospectively alter our understanding of an existing work.

What you thought was a ruin becomes a constructed work. What seemed disorder reveals a cartography. What resembled a provocation becomes a question. What appears to belong to the past turns out to speak of the present. The film had to produce these reversals. It could not therefore begin by explaining. It first had to draw the viewer in.

This is where 999 differs from many documentaries. The commentary tends to reassure the viewer. It tells them what they are watching before they even have time to be disturbed. I wanted to preserve a time when the image could act almost on its own, when the viewer is forced to formulate their own hypotheses.

This confidence in the intelligence of the viewer permeates my relationship with art.

I never wanted a label to close off a work with a definitive explanation. The text can enrich, document, and provide access to its genesis. But it must not deprive the viewer of their right to interpretation. 999 functions in the same way. It does not seek to control all readings. It constructs a syntax strong enough for an experience to take place.

This syntax is obviously related to editing.

Editing is perhaps the art form that most closely resembles my way of thinking. It consists of creating meaning from elements that, separately, do not convey the same message. Two close-ups produce a third idea that does not fully exist in either of them. That is precisely what kaleidoscopic logic is.

A geopolitical fresco followed by a machine, then an alchemical fragment, then a burnt-out building is not a simple succession. Their juxtaposition creates a relationship. This relationship must, of course, remain sufficiently open to avoid becoming propagandistic. Editing can be terribly authoritarian. By choosing the order of the images, one can force a causal link, suggest guilt, manufacture an emotion.

I know the power of images too well to ignore it.

So I was looking for a form of polyphony. But the word itself requires precision: not neutrality, which does not exist, but a trajectory constructed enough to produce an experience and open enough not to dictate a conclusion.

The film is not a tribunal. It is a journey.

This journey, however, possesses a precise rhythm. A Total Work of Art cannot be filmed like a slow catalogue where each object receives a few seconds of equal attention. One must accept accelerations, decelerations, and pauses. Rhythm produces the sensation of space.

A rapid sequence can create a saturation of signs; a slower movement can reintroduce mass, allowing a sculpture to regain its gravity. This alternation has always interested me because it corresponds to my own relationship with the world. I can live intellectually at very high speed, then need to stop abruptly before a material, an image, a detail.

The film was intended to evoke this alternation. It is not about the aesthetics of a music video. It is about a cognitive respite.

Too much speed and everything becomes the same. Too much slowness and the Abode of Chaos loses its tension. The challenge lies in finding the right balance where the viewer remains engaged without becoming passive. Sound obviously plays a role in this construction. It is often underestimated in visual representations, as if it were simply meant to accompany the images.

But sound completely changes the nature of a filmed space.

A silent, metallic mass is not perceived as the same mass when accompanied by a low frequency. A scene showing a ruin can become melancholic, menacing, historical, or almost abstract depending on the soundscape. Sound is therefore a material for temporal sculpture.

In a work like The Abode of Chaos, which has always maintained a very strong relationship with industrial music, frequencies, machines, construction noises and post-catastrophe atmospheres, it would have been absurd to consider the soundtrack as mere embellishment. It had to participate in the architecture of the film.

I like the idea that cinema can add a dimension to the Abode of Chaos that is not exactly present in the physical visit.

The film does not reproduce. It translates.

A good translation never seeks to produce an impossible copy of the original. It finds in another language a structure capable of producing a similar effect. Filming a Total Work of Art requires this intelligence of translation. One cannot transfer nine thousand square meters onto a screen; one must invent a temporal equivalent.

Where the visitor moves through space, the viewer moves through the time of the editing. Where the physical body turns its head, the film cuts. Where perspective changes with walking, the camera tracks. Cinema thus reconstructs an invisible architecture.

This architecture of time constitutes a second Abode of Chaos.

It is not a substitute for the first, but a derivative work with its own rules. That is why I have always placed great importance on the screenplay of these films. Even when an image appears documentary, it is part of a deliberate structure. The word screenplay does not mean fiction. It means the organization of a trajectory.

The real visitor can take a thousand paths. The film must choose one. This choice necessarily implies an interpretation of the work. 999 is therefore also an interpretation of The Abode of Chaos by its own author.

An artist who films their own work does not produce a neutral source. They produce an additional layer of the work. The film tells us as much about how I wanted the Abode of Chaos to be viewed at the time as it does about the physical state of the location at the time of filming. Over time, this constitutes an extraordinarily valuable archive.

Some surfaces have changed, some works have been completed, some areas transformed. 999 retains a state. But above all, it retains a way of relating that state. It is an interpreted archive.

This concept helps to understand why films should never be used as mere illustrations.

They are primary sources. They contain framing choices, movements, emphasis, absences. They are part of the genesis of the work. When I look at them again today, I can sometimes observe things that I had not consciously formulated at the time: a repetition of forms, an emphasis placed on a particular space, a chromatic tension.

Like the codices, the film possesses a retroactive capacity.

It later reveals what the present moment of filming could not yet name. This is one of the reasons why I have always wanted to archive the footage from The Abode of Chaos on a massive scale. Filming is not just about communication. It is about giving the future a way to question the present.

This documentary obsession took on an even stronger dimension with the release of 999. Very quickly, it was no longer meant to remain an object accessible only to a few specialists or festivals. I wanted widespread distribution. The Abode of Chaos had an international vocation from the outset.

Its geopolitical content, its references, its relationship to the Art Market, its portraits, and its technologies could not be confined to a purely French interpretation. Languages, therefore, had to be considered. The film was progressively adapted into several language versions depending on the edition and the media.

This work involved much more than a simple language change.

Translating an artist's film is not simply a matter of replacing a French voice with a foreign one. References do not resonate in the same way everywhere. A Korean, American, Chinese, German, Italian, or Arab viewer does not necessarily share the same visual history or the same relationship to the events depicted.

Linguistic translation can never be a complete cultural translation. We must accept that some meaning is transformed when shifting languages.

This transformation does not bother me. In fact, it deeply aligns with my conception of the work. A global work should not be received identically in every country. It must be able to enter different contexts without losing its core. That is precisely what happened with the geopolitical portraits.

The face of a political figure is not perceived in the same way depending on the viewer's country. The artwork then functions as a kind of differential mirror. It also reveals to the viewer their own cultural position. 999, by circulating in several languages, has begun to accomplish what the Abode of Chaos did with international visitors: produce divergent interpretations from the same system.

The DVD was one of the major vectors of this circulation.

Today, in an age dominated by streaming and platforms, it is easy to forget what this small optical surface represented back then. A DVD could circulate from hand to hand, be sent all over the world, projected without a connection, archived, copied within certain limits, slipped into a publication, given to a journalist, an institution, a visitor.

It possessed a materiality that online video no longer has. It could almost become an editorial object.

We ensured its massive dissemination through the various editions and circulation operations surrounding the Abode of Chaos. This figure is only interesting if one understands what it means conceptually: the Total Work of Art developed an autonomous organ of reproduction.

Walter Benjamin would obviously have recognized the issue immediately.

What happens to the aura of a unique place when its image can be reproduced millions of times?

For me, the answer has never been one of simple loss. The film does not steal the aura of the place because it cannot reproduce it. It creates another experience. Reproduction does not replace presence; it creates a desire, a memory, a preliminary knowledge. Many visitors have probably seen an image or a film about The Abode of Chaos before coming.

Their first physical visit was therefore already imbued with a media memory. They recognized certain shapes. But the confrontation with reality then produced a second shock: the size was not what they had imagined, the material did not react as it did on the screen, the spatial relationships were different.

I really like this gap between the known image and the thing encountered.

It reminds us that representation is never reality. The more a work of art is publicized, the more important this distinction gains. The Mona Lisa exists today in the imagination of people who have never physically seen it. When they come face to face with it, they encounter almost as much the difference between the mental image and the object as the object itself.

The Abode of Chaos, on its own scale, experienced a similar phenomenon.

The news reports, photographs, and videos have constructed a parallel Media-driven Abode of Chaos to the physical Abode of Chaos. 999 is one of the first deliberate architectural creations of this Media-driven Abode of Chaos. It therefore had to be faithful enough not to become mere advertising, yet autonomous enough to stand alone as a work of art.

I was determined to maintain this border.

Communication generally seeks to reduce ambiguity. It aims to convey a clear, memorable, and effective message. Art often functions in the opposite way. It amplifies fertile ambiguity. It introduces questions. When we disseminated 999 on a massive scale, the danger was that this dissemination would transform the artwork into a mere communication product.

I did not want that.

The film had to retain its inherent difficulty, its strangeness, its abrupt shifts. It was not meant to become a mere video brochure. Mass distribution should never necessitate the impoverishment of content. That is a principle I have always upheld. You can speak to millions of people without considering them intellectually incapable.

Quantitative success does not require simplifying to the point of poverty.

This is precisely what the mass media sometimes forgets. They confuse accessibility with simplification. 999, on the other hand, seeks accessibility through experience. You can know nothing about art history and still be captivated by the film. Then, if you want to delve deeper, additional layers emerge.

It is yet another fractal reading structure.

This principle also helps to understand my relationship to Stalker. Andrei Tarkovsky's film is one of the references that naturally come up when talking about Zone, not because The Abode of Chaos is a transposition of its universe, but because Stalker produced one of the most powerful representations of a space where external geography and internal state become inseparable.

In the Zone, one never simply moves from point A to point B. The journey is an ordeal. The space seems to have its own rules, perhaps even an intelligence. One must respect detours that seem irrational. The direct path is not necessarily the right one.

This idea resonates deeply with me.

The Abode of Chaos also functions as a space where physical orientation sometimes becomes mental orientation. You might arrive with a very simple intention — to see a place you've heard about — and then find yourself confronted with images or signs that completely alter your visit.

This is not the same Zone as Tarkovsky's, obviously, and I reject lazy analogies. But there is a kinship in the question: what does a space do to the one who traverses it? This is much more interesting than the post-industrial visual resemblance that some might point out.

The landscape of Stalker is powerful precisely because the ruin there becomes psychic.

Industrial abandonment is not a backdrop; it is a state of civilization. This profound perspective connects with my use of the aesthetics of catastrophe. I am never interested in ruins solely for their formal beauty. They are a tool for historical interpretation. They reveal what an era leaves behind after its promise has been exhausted.

Abandoned industrial buildings tell the story of modernity as much as official monuments. Virilio and Tarkovsky sometimes converge in my view on this point: one contemplates accident, the other makes the rugged landscape an existential condition. The Abode of Chaos copies neither. It absorbs them into its own system.

999 made it possible to reveal this lineage without having to transform it into an art history lesson. A camera that moves slowly over a material, water, an industrial surface, a scarred landscape can produce a cinematic memory even before the viewer consciously identifies the reference.

That is also what visual culture is: an archive of forms that operates within us sometimes without us knowing how to name it.

The film could therefore draw upon this collective memory while simultaneously forging its own language. However, it was crucial to avoid one of the easiest pitfalls: excessively aestheticizing the catastrophe. A beautiful image of a ruin can become so seductive that it obscures the very meaning of ruin.

I have always been wary of this aesthetic consumption of disaster.

The image of war can become graphically magnificent, and it is precisely here that the ethics of the gaze become crucial. The Abode of Chaos uses powerful geopolitical images, portraits, and traces of conflict, but it must never reduce real suffering to mere texture. The film bears the same responsibility.

Camera movement, music, and editing can easily glorify what should be questioned. This tension must be constantly maintained. Aesthetics are necessary because we are in the realm of art. But they must not numb the moral question.

That is why the initiatory film is not a purely sensory experience.

It must retain points of resistance, moments where the viewer cannot simply be carried along. An image must sometimes interrupt the visual enjoyment. It must say: this face, this war, this event existed. The spectacle then encounters the archive.

This is precisely what distinguishes the Abode of Chaos from a post-apocalyptic theme park.

A theme park constructs a coherent fiction to entertain. The Abode of Chaos uses spectacular forms to constantly draw the viewer back to historical reality. Its portraits are not characters. Its wars are not scenarios. The work does not invent catastrophe; it treats it as a subject of conscience.

999 had to make this difference perceptible without heavy-handed explanation. This is an immense challenge, because the screen naturally transforms everything into a representation. When a real war and a fictional one both appear on the same luminous surface, the device tends to make them visually equivalent.

This is one of the major problems of our image-driven civilization.

A video of a bombing might be watched for a few seconds before an advertisement, a music video, or a scene from a TV series, then forgotten within the same feed. The editing of these platforms has produced a kind of general equivalence of attention. 999 belongs to a time before the total dominance of these feeds, but the issue was already there.

How can we prevent a powerful image from simply becoming just another image?

One answer is duration. Another is context. A third is its inscription in a physical place. The mural at the Abode of Chaos possesses a permanence that media images lack. An event that disappears from the television news can remain on the wall for years. The film then documents this persistence.

We are therefore engaged in a complex interplay between the fleeting event, the enduring work, and the film that records an intermediate state. This layering of temporalities is one of the great strengths of the audiovisual corpus of the Abode of Chaos. Revisiting 999 today is not simply revisiting a film. It is observing how we viewed certain events, certain works, certain spaces at that time.

The film becomes a time capsule.

That is why I am so keen on preserving all media, even when they are technologically obsolete. Betacam, DVD, and successive files are not just containers to be migrated. They tell a story of representation techniques.

The same shot, digitized today, is no longer perceived in the same way as when it was first broadcast. Resolution, screens, and editing techniques have changed. Our eyes themselves have become technologically adept. A tracking shot that appeared extraordinarily fluid at one time may seem different today to a generation accustomed to digital stabilizers and drones.

This evolution in perspective interests me greatly.

It means that the audiovisual work continues to change without the file changing. The technical context transforms the reception. This obviously applies to the entire Abode of Chaos. In 1999, a scarred architecture, saturated with signs and references to networks, did not mean exactly what it means today, after more than twenty-five years of digital distribution, the rise of social networks, connected phones, information warfare, and now artificial intelligence.

The work does not change simply because we intervene in it. The world around it changes.

The film is therefore a way of temporarily fixing this relationship between the work and its time. I see in it one of the strongest documentary functions of cinema: preserving a present that is still unaware of what it will become. When we look at images of the construction site from the early years, we now know what the Abode of Chaos has become.

The people being filmed, however, were unaware of this. This asymmetry evokes a particular emotion. The future depicted in the film has become our past. Some people have disappeared. Certain decisions have had unimaginable consequences. The film retains this innocence of the present. It shows actions before they become history.

That is why I reject any overly rigid hierarchy between auteur film, television report, technical recording or construction site video.

They do not all share the same artistic intent, but each can preserve an irreplaceable piece of memory. The audiovisual corpus of the Abode of Chaos is immense precisely because we have embraced this plurality. There are our own films, those from international channels, journalists, visitors, creators, and networks. Everyone sees something different.

This polyphony constitutes a unique archive of the contemporary perspective on a living work.

999 is unique because it comes from within: it preserves both a state of the Abode of Chaos and the perspective I had on it at the time. This position is both its documentary strength and its limitation. By constantly inhabiting a work, constructing it, and observing it, some things become visible while others perhaps cease to be so.

Other cameras were coming. They would not be looking from the same place, nor with the same intentions. They would sometimes see what I no longer saw. They could also simplify, shift, interpret differently. It was precisely this difference that would become interesting.

999 already established one thing: the work could become reproducible without becoming reducible.

Technical reproducibility might seem contradictory to the uniqueness of the Total Work of Art.

In reality, it produces a two-tiered system. The place remains absolutely unique. Its history, its soil, its buildings, its layers, its companions, its accidents cannot be duplicated. But its representations can circulate infinitely. The more they circulate, the more the physical work becomes the fixed point to which these images refer.

Digital technology does not necessarily destroy singularity; it can sometimes make it even more visible.

An image available everywhere reminds us that it comes from somewhere. Hence the need to maintain its provenance. A photograph taken out of context can quickly become a generic backdrop of chaos. It is essential to maintain the connection with the Abode of Chaos, with the artwork, with the artist, and with the date.

The film naturally achieves this contextualization because it constructs a sequence. It shows that every detail belongs to a system. This is also why the long format seems important to me. In today's social media, an image or video can be extracted in seconds and become self-contained. This autonomy increases circulation but often diminishes structure.

999 belongs to a different time period.

It asks the viewer to accept a path. It produces a continuity. This continuity is now almost political. In a world where attention is fragmented, deciding to stay twenty minutes or more within a single framework of thought already becomes an act of resistance.

We discussed this with Headquarter: digital civilization is transforming attention into a scarce resource.

Cinema, when it rejects perpetual fragmentation, can become a space for reclaiming that attention. I do not claim that 999 was conceived with this contemporary diagnosis in mind. But its mode of experience takes on added significance today. It demands not to channel surf. It demands to journey through.

That is exactly what an initiation requires.

One cannot experience a threshold by only looking at each room for three seconds. One must accept a duration. The title of initiatory visit then takes on an almost premonitory dimension. We are gradually entering an era where the capacity to sustain a long experience may become a cognitive skill to be protected.

The film constitutes an exercise of this duration.

It also shows that technology does not have a single direction. A camera can speed up the world or slow it down. A screen can scatter attention or focus it. A network can simplify or deepen it. It is not the tools themselves that decide. It is the architecture in which we place them.

This conviction runs through my entire relationship with technology.

I have never been a tech enthusiast in the naive sense. New capabilities interest me because they open up new mediums, but I always try to understand the power structures and perceptions they create. Betacam was one tool. DVD was another. Later, the 4K drone will radically change our perspective because it will give the camera an aerial presence.

Social media will then transform distribution. Each step is not just an improvement in quality. It shifts the relationship between the filmmaker, the work, and the viewer. With 999, the camera was still tied to a cumbersome apparatus, to tracks, to preparation. This weight imposed an intention.

We did not produce thousands of shots on the fly and then choose from them.

Filming required more planning. This constraint had its advantages. It forced you to think before you pressed the shutter. Lightweight technologies would later bring extraordinary freedom, but also the opposite risk: filming everything simply because it cost almost nothing.

Once everything is recorded, the problem reverts to sorting.

Once again, we find the same law as with data: abundance shifts the difficulty of acquisition to that of selection. The cinema of the Abode of Chaos will follow precisely this path. First, the relative scarcity of footage, then the explosion of possibilities, and finally the need to build archives capable of recovering meaning within this mass.

The film 999 is therefore also the beginning of a technical history of the memory of the place.

As media formats proliferate, it will be necessary to organize their preservation, metadata, language versions, rights, dates, and authors. Mass distribution creates its own documentary obligation. Mass distribution has no historical value if the master file, the different versions, and the production materials are not preserved.

This rigor may seem administrative, but it is profoundly artistic.

Transmission depends on the integrity of the source. As with Artprice, the data must be able to be retrieved within its context. I see today how this archival requirement permeates everything I have built. Even when I produce an HD video, I am already building a memory base.

Perhaps there is an inability on my part to separate creation and documentation.

I cannot create a work without simultaneously considering its legacy. It is not a fear of disappearance. Rather, it is the conviction that future time must be able to revisit and question the present act. The document does not destroy the mystery of the work. It simply allows us to distinguish what belongs to its genesis from what we subsequently project onto it.

999, in this sense, is an extraordinarily rich document because it contains both the Abode of Chaos and my way of narrating it. From there begins another story: that of the images produced no longer from within the work, but by those who come to look at it. The camera is about to change hands.