On March 20, 2025, after more than twenty-three years of procedures and a quarter of a century of creation under tension, a letter arrives.

A letter.

A few sheets of paper. Some words.

Nothing, materially, can rival the nine thousand square meters of the Abode of Chaos, its thousands of works, its tons of steel, its walls, its craters, its vanities, its bunkers, its paintings, its installations, its laboratories, and the millions of gazes that have passed through it. And yet, on that day, a few words shifted twenty-five years of history.

They come from the French Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati.

I know the power of administrative words.

I spent part of my life digitizing, indexing, and structuring legal documents, building databases capable of transforming the texts produced by the Republic into usable information. I learned very early on that a legal term is never just a word. In law, certain classifications change a legal system, and certain definitions open or close rights. An official position taken by the State can, in turn, shift the symbolic status and the institutional framework within which an issue is now discussed.

But this time, the object the State is talking about is the one in which I live.

The one I began transforming in 1999. The one for which Nadège and I went through more than twenty years of procedures, misunderstandings, paperwork, nights, work, and creation. The one in which Sydney grew up. The one around which companions worked. The one that millions of visitors came to see. The one whose uniqueness researchers, architects, academics, surveyors, journalists, artists, and intellectuals gradually learned to describe. The one whose restoration was requested.

The letter therefore does not simply add a favorable opinion to all those that already existed.

It changes the nature of the speaker.

It is no longer a critic. It is no longer a journalist. It is no longer an academic. It is no longer a visitor. It is no longer a supporter.

She is the Minister of Culture of the French Republic.

And the object she is looking at is the Abode of Chaos. This moment must be measured without turning it into a legend.

Recognition did not fall from the sky. For nearly five years, it was built through exchanges with the cultural administration, files, meetings, expertise, and the patient accumulation of evidence.

Christopher Miles played a role in this story.

Marc Drouet has counted.

Files were circulated. Expert opinions were compared. Scientific work made it possible to move beyond mere assertions.

Nicolas Detry, Raphaëlle Rivière, Claudine Houbart, DIVA, the surveyors, and other researchers helped make the site’s actual complexity visible.

This path belongs to the previous chapter. What interests me now is the moment when something shifts: on March 20, 2025, the State no longer just observes the Abode of Chaos. It begins to name it.

March 20, 2025 does not retroactively eliminate this conflict.

It produces something more interesting. It changes the center of gravity of the case.

I read. And I finally encounter the words.

"A total work of art."

Then: "constantly evolving".

I am stopping.

There are moments when we immediately understand that a qualification contains more than its definition.

For twenty-five years, we had to explain why the Abode of Chaos could not be broken down into a succession of independent interventions.

Why the wall belonged to the artwork.

Why sculpture belonged to architecture.

Why architecture was part of the journey.

Why the floors, volumes, openings, paintings, installations and structures formed a system.

Why did the cosa mentale precede and organize the apparent materiality of Chaos? And now the expression "Total Work of Art" enters the perspective of the Minister of Culture.

Three words can contain twenty-five years.

The first is "work". It seems almost commonplace. It is not.

To say "work" means that what is being looked at is no longer simply a material transformation of a building. There is an artistic intention.

A creation.

One unit.

An author.

A story.

A meaning.

Then comes "total." This word changes the scale.

The whole does not mean that each square centimeter possesses the same value in isolation. It means that the intelligence of the whole cannot be obtained by simply dividing it into parts. The Abode of Chaos exists in relationships.

Between a sculpture and a wall.

Between a wall and an opening.

Between a painting and a metal structure.

Between a vanity and the path that leads to it.

Between the historic building and its transformation.

Between the older works and those that appear twenty years later.

Between the visible and the digital.

Between matter and information.

Between Chaos and the one who traverses it.

It is precisely this relationship that the term Total Work of Art finally allows us to consider. But perhaps the most breathtaking word is the third.

Evolving.

I read it with particular attention. Because that is the whole problem. Recognizing a finished work is relatively simple.

It possesses a state.

We can photograph it. Measure it. Restore it. Compare it to a previous state. Define its integrity. Decide what belongs to its history and what does not. But recognizing an evolving work as such means accepting an additional difficulty.

Its change belongs to its identity.

This is not a minor detail. It is the heart of the problem that has pitted us for years against a rigid conception of restoration.

If the Abode of Chaos is evolving, arbitrarily returning to a previous state no longer necessarily means restoring it. It can mean interrupting the process that constitutes the work.

That is why this word touches me so deeply.

It does not merely recognize what we have done. It recognizes the work’s right to time.

The right to grow old.

The right to incorporate new forms.

The right to change medium.

The right to see life through rose-colored glasses after twenty years of rust.

The right to integrate tomorrow technologies that did not exist when it was born.

The right, ultimately, not to be killed by recognition itself.

I immediately think back to the pink period. Even as recognition was being prepared, the Abode of Chaos continued to change before our very eyes. The pink had shifted the depths, brought certain works back to light, and altered our own perception of the place. We had not waited for the work to be recognized before transforming it. And the State was about to use precisely a word capable of encompassing this contradiction: "evolving."

I experimented.

Advance.

Backed away.

Multiplied the trials.

Worked on the supports.

Nadège joined me in this chromatic and technical research, right up to the formulations, the samples, the exchanges with the chemists and this magnificent intuition of bringing forth the pink from within the Sentinels themselves.

Sydney, for his part, has developed interpretations of them in his mediations.

And the Abode of Chaos was transformed.

We did not freeze it in the state for which we fought. We continued to modify it while we fought for its existence. It is precisely this contradiction that the word "evolving" resolves.

The letter also places the Abode of Chaos within a lineage: the Ideal Palace of Ferdinand Cheval and the Cyclops, which the minister explicitly designates as "great total works." The reference is important. Not to equate the Abode of Chaos with these works, but because the ministry situates it within the same history: that of creations which are not simply an aggregation of individual works, but which themselves constitute a work of art.

Each work has its own world.

But a genealogy helps us understand that the history of art already knows of these objects that refuse the ordinary boundaries between architecture, sculpture, environment, life and creation.

Ferdinand Cheval did not ask the history of architecture for permission to invent his Ideal Palace.

Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, along with the artists gathered around the Cyclop, did not wait for a pre-existing administrative category to perfectly define what they were building.

Unique works often produce the categories that will later allow us to understand them.

The Abode of Chaos belongs to this family of indiscipline. But it also belongs to its time. It was born at the turn of the millennium.

It contains the wars of its time.

Its disasters. Its networks. Its databases. Its images. Its algorithms. Its servers. Its drones. Its information flows.

It possesses a digital dimension that the unique environments of previous generations could not have in this form.

It is simultaneously archaic and technological.

The stone and the server. The rust and the data. The alchemy and the algorithm.

That is why this lineage does not confine me. It situates me. And being situated in history after twenty-five years spent defending the very existence of the work produces a feeling that is difficult to describe.

I could talk about victory. The word does not quite sit right with me. A victory implies a victor and a vanquished. I do not want this story to end that way. I have no interest in creating an enemy I could humiliate twenty-five years later. That would be reproducing exactly the logic that the pink one tried to shift.

The question is not who lost.

The question is what we have finally managed to see.

I could speak of reparation. The word would be more accurate. But it would still be incomplete. Because no letter can restore twenty-five years.

It does not bring back the nights, the worries, the hours spent with lawyers, or the files. It does not bring back the moments when Nadège and I had to wonder how far this story would go.

It does not capture what Sydney went through, the fatigue of the teams, the tenacity of the companions, the hundreds of thousands of supporters, or the visitors who told us year after year: do not give up.

The past cannot be repaid. It is transformed. So I am looking for another word.

Switchover.

Yes.

March 20, 2025 is a turning point.

The struggle does not disappear. It changes in nature.

I am looking at Nadège.

There is a time between us that no press release can explain. We have known each other since 1982. Together we have built companies, systems, databases, information architectures, laboratories, entire lifetimes of work.

She witnessed the birth of the Abode of Chaos.

She went through every stage.

She knows the price of every decision.

In a story of this duration, big news does not always produce the reactions one imagines.

There does not necessarily have to be a scream. Not necessarily champagne. Not necessarily a spectacular scene.

Sometimes, after twenty-five years, the first reaction is silence. Because the brain has to process in a few seconds a quantity of time that it cannot condense.

1999. The first works. The first reactions.

The procedures, the support, the articles, the jurisdictions.

The openings to the public, the reports, the nights, the sculptures, the companions, the visitors, the researchers.

The records, the files, the ministers, the years. And now this letter.

I am thinking of Sydney.

He grew up with this history. For him, the Abode of Chaos has never existed without the conflict that accompanied it. That is a considerable difference between our generations.

I knew the place before the Chaos. He knew the Chaos as a given of the world. And now, a given that seemed almost permanent has just changed.

I am thinking of the teams. I am thinking of my teammates.

To those who physically worked on this site when they could still be asked what would become of their interventions if the restoration had to be carried out.

I am thinking about the visitors.

I am thinking of the supporters.

I am thinking of those who are no longer here.

A belated recognition always has this dimension. It comes to the living. But it summons the absent.

I am rereading.

We must not misunderstand what this document says. It does not transform the Minister of Culture into a judge of a dispute over which she has no jurisdiction. We must never ask more of a document than it actually states. That would only undermine what we are trying to establish.

The power of the letter lies elsewhere.

The cultural authority of the State culturally qualifies the object. This sentence is sufficient.

It is huge.

For twenty-five years, the conflict had sometimes produced confusion between two levels: the administrative situation of certain transformations and the artistic nature of the whole.

On March 20, 2025, these two plans can no longer be confused in the same way.

France, through its Minister of Culture, recognizes the artistic value of the Abode of Chaos.

France does not recognize the Abode of Chaos despite its evolving nature. It recognizes the work together with that evolving nature. That is where everything changes.

Because the future is now part of the document.

The question is no longer solely one of preservation. It becomes one of the continuation of creation. These words strike me even more deeply than words of recognition.

Continue.

That is what we did for twenty-five years. We kept going even when we were asked to backtrack. We kept going as the work grew. We kept going as the legal proceedings piled up. We kept going as the international press arrived. We kept going as researchers started to take notice. We kept going through Covid. We kept going with the digital twin. We kept going with the pink.

And now the very idea of continuation enters into the way the ministry views the work. The reversal is considerable.

Yesterday, continuing might have been seen as worsening the problem. Today, continuing becomes a characteristic of the work that must be considered.

I then understand that recognition is not an arrival.

It creates a debt.

Not a debt to the state that acknowledges. A debt to those who worked, those who documented, those who supported, those who saw before the word existed. A debt to Nadège. A debt to my children. A debt to my colleagues. A debt to the researchers. A debt to the visitors who understood something before the institution formulated it. And even, in a way, to those who opposed us.

Because their opposition forced the work to explain itself more, to document, to argue, to measure, to create archives and to bring other perspectives into its history.

I then think about everything that will need to be preserved.

The archives.

The trials.

The letters.

The plans.

The films.

The photographs.

The records.

The digital twin.

The testimonies.

The disagreements.

The contradictions.

A work that enters history cannot preserve only the documents that support it. It must also preserve those that show how it has been contested. Otherwise, it would be writing its own legend instead of documenting its history.

The conflict with the town hall, the court decisions, and the decrees then become archives. So do the letters of support, the expert reports, and the residents' photographs. Both hostile and favorable articles now belong to the same body of work. All of this constitutes not only the history of the Abode of Chaos, but also the story of how a society learns, very slowly, to look at something it did not yet know how to name.

Even our adversaries now belong to this story. I do not wish to erase them from it. Without the conflict, the Abode of Chaos would have been different. I do not mean better or worse. External resistance created tension; this tension forced us to refine our thinking, to argue, to measure, to document, to question preservation, even to the point of building a digital twin.

Adversity is not desirable in itself. But a living work can also transform what tries to constrain it.

On March 20, 2025, this layer does not disappear. It changes direction.

The pieces that had been used to defend the work also become traces of what it had to go through to finally be named.

I could therefore write: we had won. I prefer to write: we had become responsible for what we had saved.

This responsibility immediately forbids me from triumphalism. It also forbids me from believing that everything is over.

I know human systems all too well.

On March 20, 2025, the cultural state officially designated the work. This gesture did not resolve all the legal or administrative conflicts; however, it irreversibly changed their starting point.