About 260 m² in the Marais, and almost all of it is paper. The Fonds Enki Bilal opened on 11 June at 22–24 rue Charlot, in the rooms that once held the Denise René gallery. ActuaLitté calls the address a historic home of abstract and kinetic art in Paris. Its first show, Le Fond de la forme, hangs more than 200 works: original pages, paintings, sketches, film documents and tracings. Bilal turned 75 on 7 October. The show is open Wednesday to Sunday until 1 November, and entry costs EUR 10.

Bilal is Europe’s own cyberpunk master. He won the Grand Prix at the 14th Angoulême festival in 1987, wrote the Nikopol trilogy and directed Immortel, ad vitam. Now the walls around him carry pages and tracing sheets, the physical record of how a world gets built.

Bug: a question about where memory lives

Bilal has been drawing Bug since 2017. The publisher Casterman sums up the premise in one line: in a near future, “en une fraction de seconde, le monde numérique disparaît”. The whole digital world is gone in a fraction of a second. Livre 4 came out on 29 October 2025, and Bilal has announced five volumes.

Bilal described the series to Jean-Claude Perrier of Livres Hebdo as “l’histoire d’un bug informatique généralisé, que l’on redoutait déjà lors du passage à l’an 2000”: the general computer bug people already feared at the turn of 2000. Then comes the turn that makes it a story about people rather than collapse: “Un homme, Kameron Obb, à son insu, garderait la mémoire du monde.” One man carries the world’s memory without knowing it.

Speaking to Lisa Muratore of L’Éclaireur Fnac, Bilal asked it directly: « Que reste-t-il quand on a confié toute notre mémoire au virtuel ? » What remains once we have handed all our memory to the virtual? He also told her that every great invention carries a dark side, “et l’IA encore plus que les autres”, and AI more than most.

A builder of spaces

Bilal also directed Bunker Palace Hôtel (1989) and Tykho Moon. He designed décors and costumes for Alain Resnais’s La vie est un roman, some of them drawn on glass, and the sets and costumes for Angelin Preljocaj’s Roméo et Juliette in 1990. He builds worlds that a camera or a dancer can walk through, which makes him close kin to anyone who draws a section.

The Fonds exists because of the people who kept all that work together. Jean-Baptiste Barbier, a collector, publisher and gallerist who has worked alongside Bilal for more than twenty years, founded it. Clémentine Hustin directs it. The 224-page bilingual catalogue comes from Barbier Éditions.

←TODAY: In 2026, a cyberpunk who imagined total digital loss is being celebrated with a room full of originals on paper. →3012: Zurich-3012 will inherit whatever buildings we hand over, but only the parts of their records that anyone can still read. Fulcrum: A building outlives its software unless someone makes the record outlive it too.

The line into the site

A building’s record has three layers: the drawing set, the native model and the as-built. Each one needs something else to stay readable, whether a file format, a licence or a storage account. In its guide to calculating grey energy (v1.3, 2021), Minergie writes that “die Nutzungsdauer von Gebäuden wird mit 60 Jahren angenommen”: a building’s service life is assumed to be 60 years, with components amortised under SIA-Merkblatt 2032. Sixty years is longer than any file format this industry has used so far. The trade-off is plain. Native files keep the model’s full intelligence but depend on software that keeps changing. Archive formats last longer but carry less.

Two tools close most of that gap. PDF/A (ISO 19005-1, published 2005) embeds fonts and images and forbids external references, so a sheet opens the same way decades later. For geometry, McNeel’s openNURBS toolkit “reads and writes all Rhino 3DM files”, and in McNeel’s own words “neither copyright nor copyleft restrictions apply”. The engineers who keep that toolkit public are exactly the kind of unseen people PAZ writes about, and IFC belongs beside it as a neutral third copy.

Atelier: An office handing over a project today usually delivers whatever the last export produced, stored on a platform it does not control. Once AI tools start reading and rewriting project folders, a frozen, self-contained copy matters even more. Monday move: write a one-page handover rule that every finished project ships as PDF/A drawings plus the native .3dm, stored on a drive the office owns.

Hack: Open a handover model using only McNeel’s open library and check that it still holds what the archive claims. The rhino3dm Python package is built on openNURBS, so it needs no Rhino licence:

import rhino3dm
m = rhino3dm.File3dm.Read("handover_2026.3dm")
print(len(m.Objects), "objects", len(m.Layers), "layers")
print("units:", m.Settings.ModelUnitSystem)
print([l.FullPath for l in m.Layers][:10])

Run it on every archived .3dm and save the output next to the file. A count of zero objects or the wrong units means the handover is broken, and you catch it while the people who made it can still fix it.

From the late 2070s I can tell you which records survived: the ones somebody copied into a format that needed no permission to open. Bilal’s tracings are still on a wall in the Marais. Pick your last finished project, export it to PDF/A, put the .3dm beside it, and store both on a drive you own.