Here Thierry shares with me what he remembers and what he connects to his experience. I do not possess this memory: I traverse it through his words, the available documentary traces, and our dialogue, then give it written form.

— Isis

In the life of a work, there are spectacular moments whose dates everyone can remember.

March 20, 2025 will be one of them.

But dates that go down in history almost always have a story before history. The recognition of the Abode of Chaos by the French Ministry of Culture did not fall from the sky. It did not come about through a letter that suddenly arrived after more than twenty years of conflict. Nor is it the product of an instantaneous conversion of the administration.

It was preceded by nearly five years of work with the State.

Five years of files, visits, expert assessments, exchanges, photographs, plans, surveys, discussions, questions and answers.

And above all, five years during which something much more difficult than convincing had to be accomplished: allowing the State to look.

I can see the difference.

To convince means that you already know the conclusion you want to reach and that you construct an argument to lead your interlocutor to it.

Looking implies something else. Looking requires time.

The Abode of Chaos cannot be understood from a photograph.

Nor can it be summed up by a facade. It cannot be reduced to a few spectacular sculptures, a television report, an urban planning procedure, or the media image that has been built around it since 1999.

You have to go in, walk, come back.

Look up, look at the ground, understand the traffic patterns.

See how the works fit into the architecture, observe what a sculpture produces from a specific point and what it ceases to produce when one moves a few meters.

We need to understand the layers.

The Abode of Chaos is not only extended in space. It is extended in time. A work from 1999 can engage in dialogue with an intervention from 2001, another from 2011, a transformation from 2022, and a technology introduced twenty years after its conception.

The place has become an accumulation of temporalities.

This is why the first difficulty of the institutional dialogue was probably this: in which category should we place what we are looking at?

An architectural structure? A museum? A collection?

A workshop, an art site, an installation?

A sculptural ensemble, an environmental artwork, a piece of contemporary heritage?

None of these answers is entirely wrong. None is sufficient.

The concept of a Total Work of Art allows us to understand that the difficulty of classification is not a weakness of the object. It is one of its characteristics.

The Abode of Chaos transcends categories.

What had been a source of conflict for years was gradually becoming a subject of study. For a long time, we had been asked, implicitly or explicitly:

How can this object be placed back into a known category?

Then the question was reversed. What if the known categories themselves had to evolve in order to understand this object?

This is where my dialogue with the State truly begins.

I say "the State," but the State is never a person. This is a common mistake when discussing institutional recognition. We imagine an abstract entity that decided one morning: this is now a work of art.

The reality is much more human.

The state has faces. Women and men read the files. Civil servants ask questions. Conservatives observe. Experts compare. Officials take positions. Administrations compare their skills.

Sometimes people agree to reopen an issue that others have long considered settled. In our story, several names must be preserved.

The Directorate General for Artistic Creation.

The DRAC Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

Christopher Miles.

Marc Drouet.

And, around them, the interlocutors, experts and services that allowed a case long confined to the language of conflict to gradually enter that of creation and heritage.

We need to understand this shift.

For twenty-five years, a considerable part of the history of the Abode of Chaos had been written in the vocabulary of law.

Compliance.

Urban planning.

Restoration.

Procedure.

Appeal.

Decision.

Execution.

We responded in that language because we had to. But a work cannot be entirely described by the vocabulary of what is being criticized about it. At some point, we had to return to the original question.

What is the Abode of Chaos?

This question seems elementary. It is immense. Because if the answer is: a work of art, then all subsequent questions change.

We no longer view an architectural transformation in the same way if that transformation constitutes an artistic act. We no longer speak of the alteration of a surface in the same way if that surface belongs to the artist's visual vocabulary. We no longer simply ask how to return to a previous state. We must ask what would be artistically destroyed by this return.

And when the work is no longer limited to a movable object but involves the building, the ground, circulation paths, structures, volumes, paintings, sculptures, installations, and the landscape itself, the question grows more complex still.

Where does the work end?

To sculpture?

On the wall that bears it?

In the space that allows us to look at it?

To the transformed building?

The visitor's journey

To the entire site?

The scientific work described in chapter 75 had already shifted the landscape. Surveys, digital twins, and heritage research made certain properties of the work objective, which my word as author could not, on its own, establish for the administration.

Here, their function is different: they provide the dialogue with the State with external, documented, and debatable elements. The question is no longer simply what I assert about the Abode of Chaos, but what other methods allow us to establish about it.

We are very far from the naive idea that recognizing a work of art would mean placing a barrier around it and forbidding anyone from touching it. For the Abode of Chaos, this solution would constitute precisely an act of destruction.

It would preserve matter by removing the principle that gives it meaning. An organism preserved in formaldehyde still retains its form. It is no longer alive.

I did not want the Abode of Chaos to become an organism preserved in formaldehyde.

This is the question that the dialogue with government services had to gradually incorporate. And this dialogue took time.

Five years is not excessive when one considers the difficulty of the subject. I would even say today that they were necessary. Because it was necessary to move beyond twenty years of opposing views.

We needed to look at the archives.

Understanding history.

See the website.

Read the works.

Listen to the experts.

To measure what had changed.

Above all, two entirely different questions had to be kept separate: does the Abode of Chaos comply with a particular administrative reading of its history? And does the Abode of Chaos possess an artistic value that demands recognition as such? For too long, the first question had obscured the second.

The work undertaken with the cultural administration has made it possible to distinguish between them. This does not mean that the law disappears. It means that art reappears.

This reappearance is gradually changing the intellectual balance of power.

I am no longer simply dealing with people to whom I must explain why restoration would destroy a work of art. I am dealing with people who are beginning to ask themselves how to preserve that work. The difference is staggering.

For years, we had provided arguments in defense. Now, conservation issues were emerging.

For years, we had talked about survival. Now, transmission was emerging.

The change in vocabulary already indicated a change of world.

Christopher Miles and Marc Drouet are part of this story. I want their names to be included because an institution should never absorb those who have had the administrative and intellectual courage to examine a case in all its complexity.

In a bureaucracy, it is always easier to reproduce the previous qualification than to reopen a question.

A file has inertia.

Once a case has been described for years according to a certain framework, that framework tends to become the administrative reality itself.

Each new note quotes the previous one.

Each new analysis inherits the old vocabulary.

The document sometimes ends up looking instead of the one who reads it. Breaking out of this loop requires a simple yet rare act: returning to the object.

Look at the Abode of Chaos.

Not its reputation.

Not its caricature.

Not just its legal dispute.

The Abode of Chaos.

Its nine thousand square meters. Its thousands of works. Its walls. Its sculptures. Its paintings. Its installations. Its laboratories. Its visitors. Its archives. Its transformations. Its openness to the public. Its international influence. Its history. Its place in an artistic lineage. Its irreplaceable nature.

Its constant evolution.

When we return to the subject at hand, the situation changes. I am not saying that all resistance disappears. It does not. Nor am I saying that the administration suddenly becomes unanimous. An administration never operates that way. I am saying that another perspective becomes possible. And when a perspective becomes possible within an institution, it gradually produces its own consequences.

The DRAC Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes ensures this proximity to the territory; the Directorate General for Artistic Creation provides another scale.

Paris and Lyon.

The field and the central administration.

The physical work and its place in creative policies. Levels that may have seemed distant are beginning to converge towards the same question.

What should the State do when it recognizes before it a singular work that its ordinary categories cannot grasp?

This issue does not call for a favor. It calls for a responsibility.

I have never asked for a privilege because I am an artist. I ask that the work be viewed for what it is.

The law must remain the law.

But the law cannot properly apply to an object whose nature it does not recognize.

To qualify is therefore already to act.

This is where the word "work" acquires considerable force.

Then the expression "Total Work of Art".

Then the "evolving" nature.

Each of these words has a consequence. A work of art is protected by copyright. A Total Work of Art implies that its elements cannot be arbitrarily cut out without compromising the integrity of the whole.

An evolving work implies that its change should not automatically be interpreted as an alteration of what should remain static.

The vocabulary thus prepares the decision.

The years leading up to 2025 are thus shaping the language in which the State will finally be able to write. And in the meantime, we continue to work. The Abode of Chaos is not waiting for its recognition.

The pink appears.

The work continues.

The laboratories are experimenting.

Visitors arrive.

The mediators tell their story.

Sydney develops his interpretations.

Nadège continues with me the daily work on this material which has become gigantic.

The digital twin is progressing.

The documentation is piling up.

The world continues to produce events that the Abode of Chaos absorbs.

The chronology must remain clear: we do not transform ourselves in order to be recognized. We are gradually recognized while we continue to transform ourselves. That is precisely the causal relationship. It precludes any opportunistic interpretation of this story.

The pink period provides the most striking demonstration of this.

Even before the State has formally recognized it, I am taking the risk of profoundly altering a chromatic identity built up over more than twenty years. Therefore, I am not seeking to present the administration with a stable object. I am presenting the problem in all its complexity.

Here is a work of art.

This is a Total Work of Art.

This is a work that has existed for a quarter of a century.

This is a work known internationally.

This is a work that has been studied scientifically.

This is a work whose digital documentation achieves exceptional precision.

And here's the difficulty: it is not over.

I believe it is from this difficulty that the recognition of 2025 derives its full significance. It would have been much simpler to retrospectively recognize a dead artist and a completed work. The history of art is full of such belated redresses.

The company rejects it.

The artist dies.

Decades pass.

Then the institution classifies what it had previously rejected. Everyone can then celebrate without taking many risks.

The Abode of Chaos poses a more uncomfortable question.

The artist is alive. The work is alive. It continues. To recognize, therefore, means accepting that something else may still happen after recognition. Recognition thus concerns a work whose future remains open.

The state does not merely recognize a past. It opens up a future.

That is why I do not consider the five years preceding March 20, 2025 as mere administrative preparation. They constitute a much rarer political and cultural experience.

An institutional apparatus gradually learns to change its perspective on an object that another part of the institutional apparatus had long understood primarily through the lens of conflict. It does not necessarily deny its history. It reinterprets it.

And this ability to reread is a form of intelligence.

I have spent my life working on information systems. I know how dangerous a database can become when it only accumulates its own certainties.

An old piece of information enters the conversation. It is repeated. It becomes a reference. The reference is quoted. The quote reinforces the initial information. Then, after several cycles, no one returns to the original.

Bias has become architecture.

Human institutions face the same danger. True progress begins when someone returns to the source.

This is what happened with the Abode of Chaos. Returning to the source meant physically returning to the work. But also returning to its artistic history.

Its genealogy.

At its conception.

To its thousands of elements.

To its relationship with the place.

To its materials.

To its transformations.

In the way it has developed over time.

In the way that ancient architecture, sculptures, paintings, scars, installations, landscapes, data and now digital technologies compose a single system.

Its relationship with the public.

To those millions of visitors who do not constitute aesthetic proof but who bear witness to a cultural reality.

Its relationship with researchers.

To its relationship with those who, for years, have tried to understand how to preserve an object whose transformation belongs precisely to its identity.

Finally, to its relationship with its author.

Because behind all the administrative qualifications there remains something that no procedure can produce in my place.

The cosa mentale.

The initial act by which a system of signs, forms, materials, and temporalities was conceived before being progressively embodied. I believe that these five years have essentially consisted of allowing several languages to meet.

The language of the artist, the language of heritage.

The language of administration, research, and law.

The language of measurement.

No single one of them could exhaust the Abode of Chaos. They had to stop canceling one another out and begin to complement one another.

Perhaps this is what institutional maturation is all about.

Not the victory of one vocabulary over all others. The ability to understand that a complex object requires several simultaneous interpretive frameworks. I am not idealizing this period. It was slow. It was difficult. It sometimes bred impatience.

After twenty years of conflict, five more years may seem like an eternity. But I know now that solid recognition could not be forged in haste.

It needed to be documented.

That it can resist simplifications.

That it should not depend solely on the sympathy of one person.

That it be sufficiently built to be able to survive changes in functions, changes of ministers, changes of administrations.

An institution is only strong when the knowledge it produces becomes transmissible within itself. This is exactly what is beginning to happen.

A person is watching.

Then another one.

A service is working.

Then another one.

A visit produces a rating.

A file produces an expert opinion.

An expert opinion leads to a new question.

Scientific work intersects with administrative data.

Administrative data meets the site experience.

The traditional form of representation is beginning to lose its monopoly.

The object returns to the center. And little by little, something becomes possible that was not possible before.

The Ministry of Culture can issue its own classification of the Abode of Chaos.

Not mine. Not that of our supporters. Not that of a journalist. Not that of a researcher.

Hers.

This is where the five years take on their full meaning. They have allowed the conditions for dialogue to be built. Dialogue which, when it comes, will not be the arbitrary flash of political power. It will be the culmination of a long shift in perspective.

On March 20, 2025, this message finally takes shape.

A letter arrives.

After more than twenty years of struggle and nearly five years of maturation with the State, France is about to pronounce the word.

The files.

The visits.

The discussions.

The plans.

The records.

The researchers.

Civil servants.

The people who agreed to return to the work.

The years needed to move beyond a representation that is two decades old. Because without them, the letter of March 20 would be almost incomprehensible.

One might think it was an administrative miracle.

There was no miracle. There was work. Patience. Women and men. Documents. Ways of looking. And the time required for an institution to agree to ask a new question of an object it thought it knew. Then came the day when the words could finally be written.

March 20, 2025.

After more than twenty years of struggle and almost five years of maturation with the State, France is going to pronounce the word.