There are works to which time naturally brings recognition. They are born, they are exhibited, they enter collections, they find their critics, their historians, their institutions. The Abode of Chaos has experienced an almost opposite trajectory. For more than twenty years, it grew under the threat of disappearing. It continued to produce forms even though some of those forms were precisely what it was being asked to erase. It opened itself to the public while its existence remained legally contested. It was photographed, filmed, studied, and visited from dozens of countries, while just a few meters from its walls, a far more brutal question persisted: will this work have the right to remain what it is?

Twenty-five years. Time matters.

It matters because a conflict lasting a few months can be an accident. A conflict lasting a few years becomes a period. A conflict that spans more than two decades ends up becoming part of the very fabric of a life.

I do not, however, intend to recount twenty-three years of legal proceedings here as if writing a court brief. The courts involved, the decisions rendered, the appeals, the legal arguments, the legal classifications, and the documents produced belong to the archives. They are essential for establishing the facts. But their mere accumulation would not convey what we experienced. A procedural chronology could be accurate and yet remain profoundly inaccurate on a human scale.

What interests me is elsewhere.

What becomes of a man when he builds a work of art and for twenty-five years does not know if it will be allowed to survive?

And what becomes of a work when it knows, through the one who pursues it, that it may be condemned to revert to the appearance it had before its creation?

The Abode of Chaos began in 1999. At that time, I did not establish a museum in the classical sense of the term. I did not decide to hang works in a pre-existing building. I did not transform a place to house art.

I transform the place itself into a work of art.

This difference contains almost all of the conflict to come.

Stone is no longer the neutral support for a painting. The wall is no longer the envelope of a building. The ground, the openings, the volumes, the metal structures, the traces of fire, the craters, the monumental sculptures, the inscriptions, the portraits, the vanitas, the installations, the carcasses, the bunker, the deconstructed and reconstructed architectures become the elements of the same language.

There no longer exists, on one side, the receptacle and, on the other, the work.

The receptacle has become the artwork.

This is precisely what administrative and judicial history will take a long time to grasp.

In the early years, the disagreement seemed almost insoluble because two systems of interpretation met without speaking the same language. One looked at buildings, facades, urban planning regulations, and material transformations. The other looked at a Total Work of Art in the process of being created.

The same stones exist in both readings.

But they do not mean the same thing.

This is where what I have often considered an almost semiological experience begins.

Visible chaos is not the absence of order. It possesses its own grammar, its own signs, correspondences, repetitions, ruptures, series, and temporalities. What appears accidental to the casual observer sometimes stems from an extremely precise decision.

The Abode of Chaos was not born out of confusion.

It was born from a thought.

I here claim the old formula attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: la pittura è cosa mentale.

The work is first and foremost a mental construct. The companions who accompanied me contributed their crafts, their hands, their know-how, their technical inventions, their understanding of materials. Some became indispensable to the history of the place. But the design of the Abode of Chaos, its system of signs, its orientations, its cosmogony, its narrative, and its continuity stem from an artistic vision that I have nurtured from beginning to end.

This is also why the expression "restoration" has always felt particularly violent for me.

Restore what?

In what condition?

At what date would time need to be stopped to decide that this state would be the right one?

Before 1999?

Before such a sculpture?

Before such a transformation?

Before such a portrait?

Before the place itself becomes a language?

Applied to a traditional work, restoration can mean repair. Applied to a work whose transformation is precisely the artistic gesture, it can mean the opposite: destroying the work in order to restore what existed before it.

That is the crux of the matter.

For more than twenty years, we lived with this contradiction. And yet we carried on.

I say "we" because I would be incapable of recounting this period as the adventure of one man alone. Nadège has been here since the beginning of my adult life and since the beginning of this adventure. She knew this place before it became what the world would call the Abode of Chaos. She saw the walls change, the teams work, the nights lengthen, the procedures arrive, the files pile up, and the years pass.

Above all, she knows what administrative documents never say: the intimate price of time.

A procedure has a number.

An expectation does not possess it.

A decision has a date.

A worry can last for years.

A summons is contained in a file.

But no one ranks the nights she causes.

It is here that I realize how misleading an archive can be when separated from life. The hundreds and thousands of pages produced around the Abode of Chaos constitute an indispensable record. They allow us to verify, date, and demonstrate. But they cannot alone convey what it means to wake up for years knowing that a part of one's artistic existence remains suspended on a decision beyond one's control.

Nadège experienced it with me.

Sydney experienced it in his own way.

The teams at Artprice and Groupe Serveur experienced it.

The companions of Chaos experienced it.

The visitors themselves perceived something of this, because over the years the struggle for the Abode of Chaos ended up becoming a public dimension.

The fight was no longer about the artwork. It was entering into the work.

The struggle was no longer about the work. It was entering the work itself.

Decisions, injunctions, controversies, press articles, expressions of support, stances, photographs, and demonstrations of solidarity are gradually becoming a new layer in this contemporary archaeology. The Abode of Chaos absorbs what happens to it. It transforms the event into matter, just as it absorbs the convulsions of the outside world.

It becomes its own seismograph.

When we write “Shame on you!”, the phrase is not merely an additional embellishment placed upon a conflict. It belongs to this story where the artist responds with the means of the artist. Language itself becomes a plastic material. The walls speak out because the battle is precisely about the right of these walls to speak.

I never conceived this work as a provocation. To provoke is to seek a reaction. To question is to produce an inquiry. From the beginning, my doctrine has been this: the work must question, not provoke.

A work can be difficult.

It can be uncomfortable.

It can represent war, destruction, death, terrorism, industrial disasters, political collapses, the faces of the powerful, victims, executioners, saints, revolutionaries and the damned.

It can show what the times would prefer not to see.

But its function is not to dictate to the viewer what they should think. On the contrary, it removes the possibility of not thinking.

This difference prevented the conflict from being reduced to a caricatured opposition: on one side an artist seeking scandal, on the other a community seeking tranquility.

That story is not ours.

The local opposition never represented the entire village. It was led by a limited number of particularly active individuals, and it cannot be indiscriminately attributed to the inhabitants of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or. This clarification is not insignificant. It stems from a principle I have always upheld: never to create an adversary greater than it actually is.

The village was not against us.

Some people were.

Others supported us.

Others were watching.

Some people changed their minds.

Time also altered perspectives.

For while the conflict continued, something immense was happening: the Abode of Chaos was gradually ceasing to be viewed as it had been at the beginning.

Visitors came.

Then they would come back.

The children who had discovered it returned as adults.

Families were entering.

Artists were arriving.

Photographers.

Architects.

Journalists.

Researchers.

Academics.

Art historians.

Foreign visitors who had sometimes travelled thousands of kilometers.

The Abode of Chaos was changing, but so was its audience.

Over the years, several million visitors have passed through its doors. A significant proportion came from abroad. Thousands of reports, articles, television segments, and photographs circulated around the world. The work, which might still have appeared locally as an anomaly, simultaneously became an international cultural phenomenon.

This geographical disparity has always been striking.

The further one got from Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or, the less one needed to explain that the Abode of Chaos was a work of art. In New York, London, Berlin, Beijing, or elsewhere, the question was more about what it meant.

Here, it was still sometimes necessary to demonstrate that it existed artistically.

The paradox reached a particular dimension in July 2006 when the New York Times devoted an article to the Abode of Chaos. The name then entered the international media sphere with a new force. The outside perspective accomplished something that no procedure could have achieved: it shifted the scale.

What was presented as a local problem is becoming a cultural phenomenon observable from abroad. This is obviously not a legal decision. Nor is it institutional recognition.

But it is a symptom.

The world is beginning to see things differently.

And while the world watches, we continue to build. That is perhaps the point that strikes me most in retrospect. We could have waited. We could have suspended. We could have chosen a cautious strategy: to leave everything as it was until the conflict was definitively resolved. That would have been rational.

But that would have been artistically impossible. A living work cannot receive an internal order to cease living while awaiting a decision on whether it has the right to exist.

So the Abode of Chaos continues.

It absorbs 9/11, wars, revolutions, catastrophes, geopolitical upheavals, financial crises, and technological shifts. Portraits multiply. Installations transform. New media emerge. Laboratories experiment. Metal, stone, concrete, paint, video, digital networks, drones, and gradually algorithmic tools enter its vocabulary.

Each new layer, in a certain way, exacerbates the paradox.

The larger the work grows, the more impossible it becomes to conceive of what would theoretically need to be "restored" without destruction. But also the larger it grows, the harder it becomes to deny its artistic status.

Time therefore plays out on two opposing levels.

It increases the risk.

And it produces the proof.

This is where support becomes essential.

I am not just talking about signatures. The hundreds of thousands of people who have expressed their support for the Abode of Chaos are obviously a considerable reality. But behind a number are individuals. People have written. Some have recounted their first visit. Others have explained why they consider the Abode of Chaos necessary. Artists, intellectuals, professionals, and anonymous visitors have all taken a stand.

A threatened work then discovers something strange: it also inhabits those who defend it.

It no longer belongs solely to its author.

Not legally. Not conceptually. But emotionally.

Someone who says "we must save the Abode of Chaos" is already expressing a form of symbolic appropriation. They are saying that the disappearance of this place would take something away from them.

This experience profoundly changed my relationship to the concept of transmission. In the beginning, I was building. Over time, I understood that we also had to preserve the possibility of transmitting what was still being built. This seems contradictory. It is not.

Keeping a work alive does not mean freezing it in time. It means preserving the conditions for its transformation.

This idea, which would later become central to scientific and heritage analyses devoted to the Abode of Chaos, first arose from a much simpler experience: if we gain the right to exist, we will have to know what we will do with that right.

That is why the fight cannot be described as a war waged solely against something. It is also a fight for something.

For the right of a contemporary work to produce its own temporality.

For the right of art not to be reduced to a transportable object.

For the right of a building to become something other than a building when artistic intervention transforms its nature.

Finally, there is the right to transmit a work whose identity rests precisely on its capacity to never be completely finished.

For a long time, however, these ideas remained intertwined with the immediate conflict.

We must respond. Produce evidence. Explain. Argue. Start again. Make it clear that a facade can be simultaneously architecture and a work of art. Make it clear that an apparent alteration can be a deliberate artistic act. Make it clear that the aesthetics of catastrophe have an intellectual history, notably in the work of Paul Virilio, and that it is not simply a childish taste for destruction. Make it clear that behind the impression of disorder lies an organization. Make it clear that Chaos possesses a geometry.

And above all, continue to create the work while we explain why it is a work of art.

This last sentence perhaps contains the entire twenty-five years in itself. We had to create and demonstrate simultaneously.

There is a particular kind of fatigue here.

Creating normally presupposes an inner space of freedom. Demonstrating presupposes placing oneself in the language of the other. For twenty-five years, I had to move from one to the other.

From metal to the backrest.

From drawing to law.

From sculpture to argumentation.

From the construction site to the courts.

From the cosa mentale to legal qualification.

Then come back. Always come back to the work.

Because if the fight had ended up absorbing all the creative energy, we would have lost in another way.

The real victory was not just preserving the Abode of Chaos. It consisted of preventing its defense from turning it into a sterile fortress.

That is why the doors continued to open.

The Musée l’Organe welcomed the public. The guides told stories. Visitors wandered around. Photographs were shared on social media. Journalists returned. The teams documented the event.

Sydney grew up within this story before taking on his own responsibilities. Nadège continued to maintain this thread that connects creation, businesses, laboratories, and family life. And I continued to think of the Abode of Chaos as I had always thought of it: not as a finished monument, but as an organism.

An organism heals.

It mutates.

It incorporates aggression.

It preserves the traces.

It produces new forms.

The Abode of Chaos did exactly that with its own conflict. The procedures left scars. But the scars became memory.

As the years go by, the scientific and heritage perspectives described in the previous chapter shift the very nature of the question. It is no longer simply a matter of whether to tolerate the Abode of Chaos: its structure, its duration, and the conditions of its preservation begin to be studied.

The vocabulary is changing. We are gradually moving from the possibility of suppression to the possibility of transmission. It is this shift in question that constitutes the real turning point.

It does not yet appear in a ministerial letter.

It does not yet have an official date.

It does not yet exist in the form of a recognition pronounced by the State.

But it is already there, in the changing nature of the questions that are asked of the Abode of Chaos.

For a long time, it had been necessary to defend its right to exist. Now, some are beginning to wonder how it can continue to exist. This shift seems minuscule in terms of vocabulary. It is immense in the history of a work. Because the question is no longer simply what should be eliminated.

We are starting to wonder what we will need to pass on.

It took twenty-five years to get to this point. Twenty-five years during which it would have been possible to give in.

To slow down.

To suspend.

To transform the work into a dossier.

To let fighting replace creation.

We did the opposite. We continued. And perhaps that is ultimately what time has made impossible to ignore: the Abode of Chaos had not survived for twenty-five years waiting to be recognized.

It had lived.

It had grown up.

It had changed.

It had produced new works, new perspectives, new archives, new questions.

It had not remained unscathed despite the fight.

It had made the fight itself a part of its story.

And at the very moment when scientific, heritage and institutional perspectives are finally beginning to shift, it is accomplishing something that might seem almost insane.

It is changing again.

After more than twenty years dominated by rust, steel, black, scars and the aesthetics of disaster, a color is beginning to appear.

Pink.

As if, at the precise moment when the world was finally learning to look at the Abode of Chaos differently, the Abode of Chaos decided that it too would force the world to start looking again.