City of Leaf

Artist: Nathalie Auzépy

“La Feuille de Ville” weaves together urban maps and leaf veins, connecting nature and urbanity in a harmonious and positive dialogue. It unites two seemingly opposing structures — the urban and the organic — to reconcile them in a powerful ecological and civic statement:

“MY CITY, + MY NATURE.”

A true symbolic spatial marker, it strengthens a unifying collective unconscious. From uniqueness (“My city, my neighborhood”) to the universality of a serial artwork, it embodies the values of a city or region.

Non-intrusive and made of polished mirror-finish stainless steel, it reflects its surroundings. Already present in Paris, Brussels, Kyoto, New York, Grand Rapids (USA), and now Singapore, it offers an eco-logical, humanistic, and organic vision of the city, tailored to the unique DNA of each place.

The visual diffractions orchestrated by light and shadow create an urban moucharabieh with cartographic effects. Nature, both powerful and fragile, subtly unfolds over the city. Like a Proustian madeleine, it evokes chestnut leaves fallen in schoolyards in autumn, whose soft parts we would peel away to reveal their inner structure.

Everything is structure—from the tiniest molecule to the universe itself. Rather than opposing them, City Leaf entwines urban and vegetal forms, allowing them to coexist in a new, unified, and benevolent whole. Emptiness absorbs fullness, and shadows, through shifting perspectives, overcome matter.

Suspended above its own shadow, the Leaf becomes a sensitive architectural symbol. Like a sundial, its shadow is precisely calculated to align, at a specific time of year, with a metallic imprint on the ground.
It thus becomes a landscaped garden—an artwork that binds space and time.