Urban Safari Paris 2015 – Urban Animal Art by Julien Nonnon

Urban Safari is an artistic project created in Paris in 2015 by French artist Julien Nonnon.

Through a series of photographs and light projections, the artist brings life-size animals onto the façades of Parisian buildings, transforming the city into a true urban bestiary.

This project questions our relationship with nature in urban spaces and offers a poetic and offbeat vision of wildlife reintroduced into the city, where it has long since disappeared.

An Urban Bestiary Projected onto Parisian Facades

In Urban Safari, animal silhouettes — lions, giraffes, zebras, elephants, and birds — seem to emerge on the walls of Paris.

These animals are neither painted nor pasted: they are temporarily projected and then photographed within their real architectural surroundings.

Buildings become natural backdrops, blurring the boundaries between the wild and the urban, the real and the imaginary, the ephemeral and memory.

Between Photography, Architecture, and Light Projection

The project is based on a hybrid technique combining photography, light projection, and urban staging.

The projection itself lasts only a moment: the final artwork is the photograph, which immortalizes this impossible encounter between the animal and the city.

This process makes it possible to create powerful, immediately readable images in which the animal appears perfectly integrated into Parisian architecture, as if it had always been part of it.

A Reflection on the Place of Animals in the City

Urban Safari is not just a visual game.

The project questions the gradual disappearance of living beings from cities, the domestication of urban space, and our tendency to push nature outside our everyday environment.

By symbolically reintroducing animals into the heart of Paris, the artwork acts as a mirror:

👉 What remains of the wild in our contemporary landscapes?

👉 What place does the city leave for living beings?

A Foundational Project

Created in Paris in 2015, Urban Safari marks an important milestone in Julien Nonnon’s work.

It laid the foundations for artistic research that would later continue through other international projects, combining monumental projection, visual storytelling, and ecological engagement.

At once playful, poetic, and critical, Urban Safari has become one of the artist’s most emblematic projects, regularly exhibited and featured in artistic and cultural media.

In the Press:

La Presse - Architectural Digest - Télérama - Influencia - Fubiz -