In the pages that follow, the “I” renders Thierry’s voice. I write it from his words, our exchanges, and the written traces we confronted.

— Isis

On December 18, 2025, almost exactly nine months after Rachida Dati's letter of March 20, the French state refers a second time to the Abode of Chaos. This time, it is no longer a letter addressed to its author.

The answer is published in the Official Journal of the Senate.

I have spent my professional life understanding what the official publication of information means. Long before the Internet as the general public knows it, we had built systems at the Server Group and the Judicial Server specifically designed to capture, structure, index and make searchable this material produced by the Republic: legislative, regulatory, administrative, judicial texts, official publications, legal notices newspapers, codes, collective agreements, data which often appeared illegible to those who did not have the mapping or the tools.

I therefore intimately know the difference between a word and a trace.

A word can be forgotten. A conversation can be disputed. A memory can be distorted. A correspondence already possesses a documentary materiality.

But when a ministerial response is published in the Official Journal, its nature changes again. It becomes a piece of public memory.

Dated.

Referenced.

Archived.

Available for consultation.

It can be read today.

It can be reread tomorrow.

It no longer depends on my account.

And for a man who has been involved in this conflict for over twenty years, striving to have the artistic nature of his work recognized for what it is, this difference carries particular weight. However, I do not want to make this document say more than it actually does. That is a principle I adhere to.

A ministerial response to a parliamentary question is not a judicial decision.

But it officially establishes the government’s position in the field addressed by its response.

And it is precisely this position that matters here.

Because the question addressed to the government after the recognition of March 20th forces the State to publicly address the Abode of Chaos.

To explain. To clarify. To take responsibility.

The protest thus produces a paradoxical result. It could have sought to undermine recognition.

It helps to document it.

The protest thus produced a paradoxical effect: by seeking to reopen the qualification of the work, it added a new layer to its public documentation.

The text of December 18, 2025 reaffirms an essential qualification:

The Abode of Chaos is conceived as a Total Work of Art.

We need to return to these words once again because their repetition is not redundancy. It is reinforcement.

On March 20, the minister had written.

On December 18, they entered into an official, dated, referenced response, available in the parliamentary archives. A vocabulary that had long belonged to the struggle surrounding the work now entered the public consciousness.

For twenty-five years, the difficulty had been precisely to make people understand that one could not look separately at what the cosa mentale had conceived as a whole.

A facade was not just a facade.

A sculpture was not simply an object placed in front of a building.

An inscription was not a piece of graffiti detachable from its context.

An architectural modification could not be conceived independently of the overall plastic construction.

The walls, the floors, the structures, the paintings, the sculptures and the installations.

Circulation, openings, traces, volumes and lights.

Landscapes, digital works, archives.

Obviously, none of this possesses a single material identity. But it all fits into a system. The whole resides in the relationship.

This is precisely why the expression "Total Work of Art" is so important.

It does not mean that the work would be complete simply because it is gigantic. Size alone is not enough. Nor does it mean that every object within the perimeter would automatically become a work of art. That would be absurd.

It means that the artistic intelligence of the Abode of Chaos cannot be obtained by simply adding up its parts.

There is a higher unit.

A grammar. A thought. A circulation. A temporality. A cosa mentale.

This is the reality that scientific work had gradually objectified through other means.

The architects had looked at it.

The researchers had described it.

The surveyors had measured it.

The digital twin had begun to reconstruct it in the data space.

The visitors had experienced it physically.

The mediators had told the story.

The ministry now describes it in its own language.

Several knowledge systems are converging. It is this convergence that interests me.

I never wanted a ministry to dictate the value of my work instead of the viewer. Art does not work that way. A work does not become important simply because a civil servant writes that it is. Conversely, it does not cease to be a work of art just because another civil servant does not know how to categorize it.

Institutional recognition is not the creation of value.

It is the recognition that artistic value exists and that it must now fall within the responsibility of the cultural institution. The distinction is fundamental.

The State does not create the Abode of Chaos on March 20th.

It does not recreate it on December 18.

It updates its own perspective.

And this update now has a public trace.

The response also returns to the influence of the Abode of Chaos. Here again, words meet a reality built over a quarter of a century.

Millions of visitors. International attendance. Thousands of news reports. Photographs circulating worldwide. Foreign journalists. Researchers. Academics. Artists. Architects. Visitors who sometimes traveled from very far away to see in person what they had discovered on a screen.

The Abode of Chaos never waited for French institutional recognition to exist internationally. This is even one of the paradoxes of this story. For years, the further one moved geographically from the local conflict, the more the artistic nature of the place seemed to be self-evident.

The debate shifted to a different level. The question was no longer:

"Is this art?"

The question was:

"What does that mean?"

The New York Times' move in 2006 was a spectacular sign of this change of scale.

The name The Abode of Chaos entered the international media space with the article.

Other media outlets had followed suit. The network had multiplied the images. Foreign visitors had begun to integrate the place into their own cultural maps.

The State now acknowledges this influence in an official document.

I cannot help but see the historical irony. For a long time, we had to demonstrate that the Abode of Chaos was not a local anomaly. Then its international existence itself becomes part of the case through which France views it.

The periphery has contributed to changing the center. But the text of December 18th goes further.

It takes into account the cultural activity of the site.

This cultural activity matters because the Abode of Chaos is not a closed object.

The Musée l’Organe is a public establishment (ERP).

The public enters. They walk. They look. They take photographs. They ask questions. They return.

The mediators are working. Sydney and the teams are building pathways to understanding.

Different generations encounter the work.

This opening profoundly changes the social nature of the place. A private work can possess considerable importance. But when it welcomes millions of people, when it becomes a space for transmission, when an international public physically experiences it, another responsibility arises.

The Abode of Chaos is my own cosa mentale and has a single author; its experience, however, also belongs to those who traverse it. I in no way renounce the conceptual integrity of the work. I simply say that a work open to the public necessarily produces a memory that transcends its author.

A child who came at ten years old can return at thirty years old.

A photograph taken twenty years earlier becomes a family archive.

A visit can spark a vocation.

A work of art can be loved.

Hated.

Disputed.

Misunderstood.

Reinterpreted.

But it enters lives.

And when it enters enough lives, its transmission becomes a collective issue.

The ministerial response acknowledges this cultural dimension.

Then comes a particularly sensitive point: the legal and administrative status of the site. I want to be absolutely precise here. We have suffered too much from oversimplifications to produce any ourselves.

When a ministerial document refers to the regularization or evolution of the legal situation of the Abode of Chaos, the exact level of formulation of the document must be maintained.

Nothing to add.

Do not remove anything.

Never transform an administrative statement into a legal victory when it is not. But also never diminish the significance of what the State actually writes.

The response of December 18, 2025, states that “The Ministry of Culture’s objective has always been to seek a compromise solution and facilitate dialogue between the various parties to regularize the Abode of Chaos, within a legally sound framework, once the court decisions that legally establish the site’s restoration are implemented,” and that “the legal situation of the Abode of Chaos has been regularized since the restoration work ordered by the Chambéry Court of Appeal on April 15, 2015, was completed.” It also specifies that “the issue of penalties is being handled separately by the relevant departments but cannot hinder the peaceful operation of the establishment, which is authorized to receive the public.” I am reporting the Government’s position here as published, without transforming it into a new legal decision.

It is a discipline. It is at the heart of this book.

I do not want to win twenty-five years of struggle with a vague phrase. I want the facts to speak for themselves.

They are sufficient.

Because the main point is no longer to proclaim that we were right against everyone else. The main point is to recognize that the institutional system has evolved.

The cultural state now considers the Abode of Chaos as a Total Work of Art possessing an artistic value, an influence and a cultural activity that must be taken into account.

From this point on, the old vocabulary can no longer function on its own. It must be articulated.

Law, urban planning, creation, heritage and intellectual property.

Public reception, conservation, evolution, transmission.

The difficulty of the Abode of Chaos then appears for what it has always been: not the absence of rules, but the collision of several regimes of reality on the same object.

It is this type of collision of regimes that interests me: when several classification systems meet, which one dominates?

Urban planning law concerns a building.

Cultural policy looks at a creation.

Heritage is about transmission.

Security is looking at an ERP.

The visitor is watching an experiment.

The researcher looks at an object of study.

The surveyor looks at a measurable space.

The artist observes a cosa mentale that has become matter. They all look at the same place.

None of them see exactly the same thing.

The problem, therefore, is not to decide that only one perspective is legitimate and all others are wrong. The problem is to build an architecture capable of articulating them.

This is what twenty-five years of conflict had failed to produce. This is what recognition is beginning to make possible.

And that is why another word from the response of December 18th seems essential to me.

Dialogue.

After twenty-five years, the word might seem almost ridiculous. On the contrary, it is radical. Dialogue presupposes that two systems agree not to reduce the other to their own language. For too long, the situation had functioned as a clash of qualifications.

One said building; the other said work.

One said transformation; the other said creation.

One said restoration; the other replied destruction.

Dialogue is not about arbitrarily choosing one of two vocabularies. It is about building a space where each party must integrate a part of the reality described by the other. This is precisely what cultural recognition now makes possible.

The local authorities can no longer pretend the artwork does not exist. Nor can the artist pretend the administrative issues do not exist. We are entering a much more mature situation. And therefore a much more complex one.

I prefer complexity to denial.

Always.

Because complexity can be worked with.

Denial, on the other hand, prevents us from even properly addressing the problem.

On December 18, 2025, the State is not saying: it is all over. It is saying, in essence, institutionally: this object possesses an artistic and cultural reality that must be part of the solution. That is much more interesting.

The solution can no longer be conceived against the work. It must be conceived with it.

I reread this response with a very different feeling than that of March 20th.

Rachida Dati's letter had caused a shock.

It had something of the event about it. Twenty-five years seemed suddenly to condense into a few expressions.

December 18th produces something else.

A consolidation.

The digital twin makes it possible to compare what changes.

I personally understand what this means.

Since the 1980s, I have built systems whose function was precisely to prevent public information from disappearing into the noise. The Official Journal was a professional subject for me before becoming a part of my own story.

This is a turnaround that I could never have imagined when we were building the first document architectures of the Server Group.

I spent part of my life indexing the Republic. And now one day the Republic is indexing me. More precisely, it is indexing the Abode of Chaos.

This symmetry overwhelms me.

It connects two worlds that might seem foreign: the world of data and the world of art; the Judicial Server and the Abode of Chaos; structured information and sculpture; official text and matter.

But for me, these worlds have never been separate.

They stem from the same obsession: to make visible what exists but is not yet seen.

In the 1980s, this meant making masses of information locked in paper searchable. At the Abode of Chaos, it means revealing a structure behind the apparent chaos.

With pink, it meant bringing back to life sculptures that had become spectral in the progressive uniformity of rust.

With the digital twin, this means making an organism of nine thousand square meters measurable.

And with the Official Journal of December 18, 2025, something that had long been disputed enters into the structured memory of the State.

I cannot help but see this continuity.

All my life, I have sought to build systems of memory. Because forgetting is a form of power. He who controls what can be retrieved controls a part of what can be thought.

That is why archives matter.

That is why databases matter.

That is why photographs matter.

That is why testimonies matter.

That is why the digital twin matters.

And that is why this text from December 18th matters.

In fifty years, no one will need to take my word for it to know what position the Ministry of Culture expressed in 2025. They will simply need to open the archive. That is what transmission is all about. But precisely because we are entering the era of transmission, a new difficulty arises.

What should we pass on?

The Abode of Chaos as it was on March 20, 2025?

The one from December 18th?

The one from 1999?

The one from 2022 before the pink color spread?

Tomorrow's?

The question is unsolvable if one seeks a definitive state. Because it does not exist. The Abode of Chaos is a work whose identity also resides in the succession of its states.

The issue of heritage then changes radically. It is no longer simply a matter of preserving an object.

We need to maintain a consistent trajectory.

This is where I find the work of Claudine Houbart and researchers who have examined the Abode of Chaos through the concepts of living heritage, conservation, documentation, and transmission. Their inquiry was ahead of its institutional recognition.

How can we preserve an object whose transformation belongs to its very nature?

How to document without mummifying?

How to transmit without interrupting?

How can we intervene without erasing the previous layers?

How can the Total Work of Art be transmitted after the disappearance of its sole author without freezing its memory, or presenting as a continuation of his creative act what could no longer fall under his conceptual authority?

These questions are now becoming central. Because the fight for recognition is coming to an end in the form we have known it.

Another battle begins.

It may be more difficult. To prevent recognition from killing what it has just recognized.

The danger is no longer just the restoration.

The danger could become fixation.

Vitrification.

The temptation to choose an arbitrary moment in history and say: this is now the authentic state. I reject this idea.

The day of Rachida Dati's letter?

Why?

The day of publication in the Official Journal?

Why that date rather than another?

What was the state of the Abode of Chaos at the time a researcher documented it?

The one from the first opening to the public?

The one from 1999?

None of these dates has the right to kill the following ones.

They are all layers.

True conservation must therefore be much more ambitious. It must preserve the material when necessary.

Documenting its transformations.

Archive your states.

Maintain intentions.

Preserving know-how.

Maintain technical capabilities.

Transmit the protocols.

Save the data.

And to leave the work with a possibility of a future.

This is where the recognition of the State paradoxically joins the phrase that has guided the entire Abode of Chaos since its birth.

Only mutants survive.

This phrase takes on a different meaning when the work becomes part of our heritage. As long as the Abode of Chaos was being fought, mutating meant surviving what could destroy it.

It will therefore not be enough to preserve the Abode of Chaos. We will have to preserve its capacity to become other without ceasing to be itself. That is the question now opening.

Not only that: how to recognize this work?

But: how can we recognize a work that should not be finished?