There is a yellow in Paris that I have never found anywhere else.
It lives in the late summer light at 7pm when it falls across the limestone facades of the old arrondissements. It lives in the glow of a brasserie at midnight in January, when the rain is cold outside and everything inside is warm and unhurried. That yellow is not a colour. It is a feeling. A frequency. A permission to slow down, stay longer, order another glass.
I have lost count of how many times I have arrived in Paris. My husband's family lives there, which means I did not choose Paris once — I keep choosing it, every year, every season, across different versions of myself. And every time, it receives me as if I never left.
What Paris has given me professionally is more difficult to explain. It starts with attention. The city does not rush you toward conclusions. It lingers in contradictions — the ancient and the radical, the elegant and the chaotic, the intimate bistro and the monumental boulevard, the bourgeois and the avant-garde sharing the same pavement. I have learned to sit inside contradiction there. To trust it as material, not as problem.
The art and installations I have visited across Paris over the years have layered themselves into a kind of private architecture inside me. I don't visit them to consume them. I visit them to be changed by them. To notice what stays after I leave the room. It was in front of a sculpture — a figure so still it felt like it was about to exhale — that the first real image of Alive Sculptures came to me. The idea that stillness is not absence. That marble remembers the body it was shaped after. That classical art is not historical — it is latent, waiting for a human presence to reactivate it.
The city as gathering point
Paris is also where I meet the world. Each summer, the city becomes a gathering point for people I love who are scattered across continents. Friends from Brazil, from London, from Lagos, from Lisbon, from Australia, from China, from Spain. We find each other in the same streets, the same tables, the same long meals that begin in daylight and end somewhere after midnight.
"Paris taught me to sit inside contradiction. Not to resolve it — to live in it. That is where every good idea starts."
There is something Paris does to people — it makes them generous with their time. It convinces even the busiest person that the conversation matters more than the schedule.
The small restaurants stay with me most. The ones that have been in the same location for decades, the ones with complete knowhow on the product. The handwritten menus. The patron who remembers what you ordered last time. The way the kitchen sends out something unexpected — a small extra course, a glass poured because the vintage is running out and it would be a shame to waste it. These places are not selling nostalgia. They are practising continuity. And I have thought about them often when working on projects about memory, about what survives, about what a culture decides to carry forward.
Paris taught me to be curious without agenda. To walk into an exhibition without reading the press release first. To sit in a park and watch how people use light. To eat slowly enough to actually taste something.
These are not small skills. In a world that prizes acceleration, they feel like resistance. Or better — like a different kind of intelligence.
"There is a yellow in Paris I have never found anywhere else. It is not a colour. It is a permission to slow down."