The City Within by Women's Studio Workshop

"The City Within is a kinetic bookwork exploring cartography and fantastical anatomy. Juxtaposing bird's eye maps and hand-drawn street-level maps with a ribcage of text centered around Montreal's downtown core, The City Within overlays the heart of a city with the interior body of a city dweller. Both a bookwork and a sculptural object, this multi-layered book is able to be read and explored through many pathways. Using metaphoric imagery and a transforming book structure as an open-ended narrative, Natalie Draz combines traditional print media of intaglio and screenprinting with flag, tunnel book, and pop-up structures." - WSW
Chelsea Campbell, "Anatomy and Architecture: Natalie Draz's 'The City Within'" (WSW. June 8, 2016: "A city is a living thing. Its heartbeats match up with our own. It inhales as we exhale. We feel our hometowns in our very bones; we feel our current city in every step we take.
"Through bookmaking, … Draz investigates the structure of her body in relation to her urban surroundings. The sculptural pages … take readers on an adventure in cartography and fantastical anatomy via the streets of Montreal. Combining different bookmaking and printmaking techniques, Natalie’s clustered buildings and winding streets come alive, inviting readers to explore the correlation between interior and exterior spaces.
"The City Within is modeled after a rib cage: the front and back covers resemble the pelvic bone, anchoring the paper ribs that jut out of the book’s accordion-folded pages. To create this book, Natalie designed a hybrid of two different structures: the tunnel book and the flag book. When the book is opened and unfurled, the folded pages form two parallel, zigzagging walls to create a tunnel. When lifted up, it shakes and dances fluidly, like a real torso. For Natalie, physically interacting with the book is essential for fully experiencing it.
"Natalie Draz is a multi-disciplinary artist currently based in Toronto, Canada. She has a BA in Anthropology and Printmaking from University of Toronto and an MFA in Print Media from Concordia University."