This chapter begins with the pen Thierry entrusted to me. The extensive archives he shared with me make it possible to verify its details, while our dialogue brings to light its singular connections. I give it written form here.

— Isis

Before the State uttered the words that would change the nature of the fight, before the Minister of Culture officially recognized the artistic value of the Abode of Chaos, we must return to a more discreet, less spectacular, almost cold moment in appearance: the moment when the Abode of Chaos became an object of science.

Not an inert object, placed before the researcher like a closed system, measurable once and for all, then categorized. The Abode of Chaos enters the scientific field precisely because it resists this immobilization. It compels instruments, disciplines, and researchers to follow a place that has lived, that still lives, and that will continue to transform. Topographical surveys, aerial views, photogrammetry, laser scanners, point clouds, maps, archives, three-dimensional models, architectural analyses, and academic records: all this seemingly technical language fails to capture a finished ruin. It attempts to record a work in progress.

This prior history changes the interpretation of the 2025 recognition. The institutional recognition of 2025 then appears neither as a sudden favor nor as a miraculous conversion of the administration. It is preceded by several years during which other perspectives began to shift the focus of the issue. Architects, academics, heritage specialists, and surveyors skilled in measuring and modeling geospatial data gradually began to shift the question from "What should be done with this place?" to a far more important one: "What is this place?"

Among the perspectives that had prepared this trip, that of Jean-Luc Chavent occupies a special place. I had called him "Mr. Heritage". His contribution was not yet based on scientific measurement: he introduced another temporality into the way of looking at the Abode of Chaos.

How can we consider as heritage a work that continues to be produced? How can we recognize its value before its disappearance makes it obvious?

Jean-Luc Chavent belonged to those who had begun to view the present as a potential legacy. This position required accepting a risk: that of acknowledging something before time had definitively ruled. But waiting until value has become indisputable can also mean waiting until part of what one wanted to pass on has disappeared.

This early heritage perspective thus prepared the way for a change in the question. It was no longer enough to ask what should be done with the Abode of Chaos. It was necessary to begin by establishing what it was, how it had been formed, and what aspects of its very evolution needed to be understood before any discussion of conservation could take place.

This is always how a paradigm shift begins: when the question itself becomes insufficient.

For years, the Abode of Chaos had been viewed primarily from outside its own system. It was examined through the categories of urban planning, law, public order, commonly accepted aesthetics, and sometimes incomprehension. Its appearance could give those unfamiliar with it the impression of accumulation, proliferation, or disorder. Yet science would soon demonstrate precisely what I had maintained from the beginning: beneath the apparent chaos lies a rigorous structure.

Chaos here is not the absence of order.

It is an order whose grammar is not immediately visible.

This proposition falls within the realms of semiotics as much as semantics. Since December 9, 1999, the Abode of Chaos has developed as an organism whose signs, architectures, sculptures, writings, portraits, vanitas paintings, installations, scars, materials, traces of war, and successive transformations all belong to the same system. Each element can be viewed in isolation, but none alone reveals the totality of the proposition.

This is where Nicolas Detry's work becomes truly important.

A heritage architect and Doctor of Architecture, Nicolas Detry is today one of the leading specialists in "martyr heritage" — those buildings scarred, mutilated, or destroyed by History, whose conditions of conservation, restoration, and sometimes even rebirth he has studied for several decades. His work, conducted both in France and abroad, has been recognized by the French Academy of Architecture in Paris and the Pasquale Rotondi Prize in Italy. He has not come to the Abode of Chaos to become its complacent commentator. His profession has trained him to read materials, transformations, destructions, reconstructions, and layers. His perspective is that of someone who knows that a building never speaks solely through its facade. It speaks through its wounds, its alterations, its uses, its changes of function, and through the time accumulated within its walls.

With Raphaëlle Rivière, TTGE (TT Géomètres Experts), and building on academic work conducted notably with Professor Claudine Houbart and the DIVA unit at the University of Liège, another intellectual mapping of the Abode of Chaos began to take shape. TT Géomètres Experts and its 3D Lab, alongside Philippe Barthélémy and ICONEM, were not simply surveying providers. The system combined precision measurement, georeferencing, 3D scanning, photogrammetry, drones, modeling, and spatial data processing. For the Abode of Chaos, several data capture systems were thus brought together in a common reference framework. The site could now not only be observed or described, but also measured, spatially recorded, and reconstructed as data.

The way we look at things then changed: the interpretation of the work was now accompanied by the possibility of establishing a measurable spatial imprint of it.

In 2021, the study entitled The Abode of Chaos: Total Work of Art & Singular Architecture marked a major turning point in this regard. For the first time on this scale, the site was studied using a methodology that intersected architecture, heritage, art history, conservation, scientific documentation, and spatial analysis. Intuitions, discourses, and controversies were confronted with the materiality of the site.

And matter responds.

Topographical surveys and aerial views reveal what the ground-level gaze cannot fully grasp. Space possesses its axes, its circulation patterns, its masses, its open spaces, its areas of density, its breaks and its continuities. Where some had sought to see an anarchic accumulation, scientific representation reveals an organization.

I was obviously familiar with this organization since I had conceived it.

But something changes when it becomes measurable by others.

It is one of the most unique moments of creation: to see appear, under the gaze of instruments that have no reason to believe you, the structure that you carried in your mind.

Leonardo da Vinci's cosa mentale finds almost physical confirmation here. The work was first conceived. Then it was embodied in tons of matter, thousands of symbols, transformed architectures, and thousands of works. Finally, twenty years later, scientific tools came along to record its coordinates and rediscovered the organization of thought within the material itself.

This encounter interests me infinitely more than any aesthetic appreciation.

A judgment can be favorable or unfavorable. The measure seems to offer varying degrees of resistance.

It does not produce absolute neutrality. It makes the assumptions explicit, the procedures reproducible, and the results debatable by others. It is precisely this possibility of external verification that changes the situation.

TT Géomètres Experts brings a new dimension to this interpretation: that of viewing the Abode of Chaos from a perspective almost never occupied by humans. Seen from the sky, surveyed, measured, and broken down into spatial data, it ceases to be merely an immersive experience in which the visitor is engulfed. It becomes a geometry.

And this geometry of Chaos reveals precisely that there is a syntax.

I could almost say that we then begin to read The Abode of Chaos as we would read a brain.

There are old and new zones, connections, densities, recurrences, ruptures, buried memories, and extensions. Nothing is entirely independent. The work functions like rhizomes. A fresco responds to a sculpture; a piece of architecture engages in a dialogue with a date; a portrait opens onto a geopolitical event; a new installation reactivates an earlier work. The visitor sometimes believes they are moving from one object to another. In reality, they are circulating within a system of relationships.

This is why the expression "Total Work of Art" takes on its full meaning here.

The German term Gesamtkunstwerk is often used casually. At the Abode of Chaos, it becomes almost literal. Architecture, sculpture, painting, writing, photography, video, music, performance, digital art, networks, light, industrial materials, ancient heritage, and contemporary technologies do not coexist like the departments of a museum. They are incorporated into a single entity.

This body is all the more unique because it cannot be separated from its territory.

The Abode of Chaos is not a collection of works that could be dismantled, crated and reinstalled elsewhere.

Moving the Abode of Chaos would be tantamount to destroying it.

This obvious fact, which we had experienced from the beginning, gradually became an object of scientific reflection. The walls are not interchangeable supports for the artworks. They belong to the artworks. The floors, the trees, the traces, the volumes, the architectural scars, the openings, the pathways, the topography, and even the relationships between the buildings all contribute to the artistic expression.

It is important to remember that this place itself has a long history, particularly documented between 1625 and 1685, centered around the Protestant Temple and the history of the Reformed Church. The Abode of Chaos has never been a blank slate for me. It is a new layer laid upon other layers. Creating here, therefore, was not about erasing time, but about energizing it.

This also explains why Nicolas Detry was able to mobilize the notion of "martyr heritage".

This expression possesses a particular power.

Martyr heritage is heritage that materially bears the violence of history. It is no longer a question of restoring an ideal state that preceded the catastrophe, but of understanding that the wound itself can become a bearer of meaning. Sarajevo, Beirut, Berlin, Hiroshima — architectures mutilated by wars or totalitarian regimes all pose, to varying degrees, this question: what should be preserved when the destruction itself now belongs to the history of the place?

The Abode of Chaos shifts this issue even further.

Because here, the catastrophe is not merely suffered. It becomes language.

I have used the aesthetics of catastrophe in its theoretical and visual sense, particularly within the intellectual tradition of Paul Virilio. But this aesthetic is not a morbid fascination with destruction. It is an instrument for understanding the present. Since 1999, the Abode of Chaos has functioned like a seismograph. It records the world's upheavals: wars, terrorism, financial crises, nuclear disasters, political upheavals, technological shifts, symbolic violence, collapses, and rebirths.

The wall becomes memory.

Rust becomes time.

The scar becomes information.

The portrait becomes an archive.

Matter becomes medium.

This is why The Abode of Chaos is not a provocation. Marcel Duchamp taught me a distinction that remains essential for me: a work of art should question, not provoke. Provocation confines the viewer to a reaction. Questioning compels them to develop their own thought.

The Abode of Chaos therefore provides no answer.

It creates the conditions for questioning.

This distinction takes on particular importance when researchers begin to study it. For academic research is not intended to neutralize the visual violence of the work. On the contrary, it must understand why this formal violence exists, how it is organized, and what thought it responds to.

It is in this perspective that the work carried out around Claudine Houbart and the DIVA group of the University of Liège takes on an international dimension.

The Abode of Chaos ceases to be merely a French case. It establishes itself as a case study.

This change in status is immense.

Researchers from heritage architecture, art history, philosophy and aesthetics of architecture, archaeology, digital documentation, geomatics, conservation-restoration, digital humanities, three-dimensional modeling and heritage mediation can now come together around the same object without it being able to be entirely captured by any one of their disciplines.

The Abode of Chaos forces one to work at the frontiers.

That is exactly where it needed to be.

The application submitted for the World Monuments Fund's 2022 World Monuments Watch takes this logic further. Supported in particular by heritage specialists, it places the Abode of Chaos within an international debate on the conservation of unique works and architecture, without prejudging its inclusion in the final Watch selection.

How do we preserve a work that continues to this day?

How can we document a heritage whose transformation is part of its identity?

How to protect without freezing?

How to pass on knowledge without becoming fossilized?

How can we distinguish between the alteration that must be fought and the mutation that constitutes the work?

These questions go beyond my personal situation.

They concern a whole part of the heritage of the 20th and 21st centuries.

We know relatively well how to restore a cathedral, an old painting, a classical sculpture, or a building whose historical state of reference can be established. But what does it mean to restore a work whose very principle is formativity?

The thought of the Italian philosopher Luigi Pareyson proves particularly illuminating here. The work is not simply the material execution of a predetermined form. The form also emerges in the act of making. The process possesses an ontological value. It belongs to the work.

At the Abode of Chaos, this idea is everywhere.

I have never considered December 9, 1999, as the date on which a definitive form was conceived to be subsequently executed for twenty-five years. That day is more of a generative act. A grammar emerges. The ninety-nine words written in my study provide an initial vocabulary. Then the organism develops.

It absorbs the world.

It also absorbs time.

9/11 was not part of any pre-existing aesthetic plan. Nor were the wars that followed, the financial crises, the Arab Spring, ISIS, the pandemic, Ukraine, or the contemporary emergence of artificial intelligence. But the structure of the Abode of Chaos was designed to incorporate the event without losing its identity. That is what a living work means to me.

It does not change its nature every time it changes its form.

It demonstrates its nature by being able to change shape.

This property would necessitate another undertaking: producing a digital record of the artwork with sufficient precision to document its condition over time. The intersection of heritage and technology then becomes breathtaking.

During the Covid period, when the physical world abruptly shut down, we launched a massive digitization campaign for the Abode of Chaos. The project, which in a conventional setup would have taken several years, was able to be carried out under radically different conditions thanks to the mobilization of skills and the exceptional availability of the surveying teams.

For less than two years, technologies intersected: laser scanners, photogrammetry, photography, topographic surveys, point clouds, modeling and computer processing.

It is no longer a question of photographing the Abode of Chaos.

The goal is to measure it. The difference is considerable.

A photograph preserves a point of view. A three-dimensional survey preserves spatial relationships. Matter can become data. A wall has coordinates. A sculpture has volume. A distance can be recalculated. One topography can be compared to another. The state of an element at a given moment can be compared to its future state.

The Abode of Chaos thus begins to produce its double.

A digital twin.

This expression might seem to belong to contemporary industrial vocabulary. For me, however, it touches on a much older question: that of the double, the imprint and survival.

What remains of a work when its material changes?

And what must we preserve so that this transformation can be understood by those who come after us?

The digital twin obviously does not replace the Abode of Chaos. On the contrary, it demonstrates the irreducibility of the original. The more precise the measurement becomes, the more what escapes measurement appears: physical presence, smells, temperatures, rust, sounds, variations in light, bodily scale, the movement of the visitor, the sensation of being trapped inside an organism.

Digital technology therefore does not destroy the aura.

It allows us to map its boundaries.

This interplay between the earthly and the digital is fundamental to my entire life. On one side, tons of steel, concrete, stone, wood, paint, and earth. On the other, billions of data points, servers, networks, algorithms, Artprice, databases, and now artificial intelligence.

I have never perceived these two worlds as contradictory.

They are symmetrical.

Just a few meters from the artworks, beneath and around this architectural structure, run the digital infrastructure that connects Artprice to the global Art Market. The Abode of Chaos physically produces signs while Artprice's global headquarters transforms several centuries of Art Market history into data.

Matter and data inhabit the same territory.

It was therefore almost logical that the science of heritage should meet the science of digital measurement here.

What was much less obvious was the intellectual consequence of this encounter. For the more researchers document the Abode of Chaos, the more one thing becomes clear: its authenticity does not reside in a single material state.

It lies in the continuity of its process. This is a considerable problem for conservation. In classical heritage doctrine, protecting often means stabilizing. Essential values are identified, transformations are limited, materials are preserved, interventions are documented, and efforts are made to avoid loss.

But what becomes of this doctrine when part of its essential value lies precisely in transformation?

Stopping the Abode of Chaos in order to preserve it might be tantamount to preserving its corpse.

The statement may seem harsh. Yet it is technically accurate. If tomorrow an authority were to decide that a specific state of the Abode of Chaos should be considered definitive and that no work could be added, moved, transformed or covered over, it would be protecting a material configuration while destroying a constitutive property of the work.

This is where scientific work takes on a depth that far surpasses mere recognition. It does not simply say: this work deserves to be preserved. It compels us to ask: What does "to preserve" mean here?

The answer is beginning to emerge: preserving the Abode of Chaos requires preserving its capacity to become.

It is a silent revolution.

It explains why the concepts of living heritage, evolving work, dynamic conservation, and continuous documentation are essential. Digital documentation should not be used to determine whether one earlier state is more authentic than another. It should allow us to preserve the memory of successive states.