Today we’re taking a look at a French publication—something we don’t do often enough here—with Geum Urbanum by Geoffroy Mathieu, the latest release from the celebrated Éditions Filigranes.
The book, slightly larger than an A4 format with a landscape layout, explores Tangier, Marseille and Edinburgh in terms of their relationships to nature. Its name is taken from the Latin term for wood avens, a European plant commonly found in rubble, hedgerows and the edge of woodlands. Following in the footsteps of Italo Calvino, who tracked the “seasons on the city,” Mathieu observes what remain of mother nature in the cities she birthed. In the heart of a 21st-century city, we’ve come to think that traces of greenery or water must have been put there by the city. Mathieu is working in reverse, tracing back.
The recent municipal elections in France have in their own way raised the question of thenature of a city. Wasteland, construction sites, ruins, irregularities and anomalies of urban life remind us of the space and time, the moment when the utilitarian vision of what has been built is reconquered by stones and sand, and the building materials revert to the pieces of mountain they once were. Behind its beautiful green cover, thirty photographs of cities, a beautiful harmony and a fresh look at the subject.
For more information: http://filigranes.com/main.php?act=livres&s=fiche&id=482
56 pages, 20 euros, 2013
