Above: Street artist Ememem repairing a pothole in a sidewalk on Rainey Street in Austin
I’m just a sidewalk poet…. My work is the story of the city, where cobblestones have been displaced.”
Street artist Ememem, interviewed by Arnesia Young for My Modern Met
Sometimes I feel like a stalker on the trail of tile mosaics of the sidewalk poet of Lyon, France. (See the photos from 18 months ago at the bottom of this post.) So meeting Ememem in person at work Sunday afternoon in Austin left me gobsmacked.
Above: “Here Lies a Pothole,” Ememem, Rainey Street, Austin, 2025
The street doctor tries to maintain his anonymity, stealthily installing his mosaics in the dead of night. I imagine that’s due to the fact that often his sidewalk improvement projects are unauthorized.
Ememem’s Austin installations were part of Mosaic Fest 2025. In addition to the one above on Rainey Street, he applied Frankenstein-style stitches to a sidewalk a block or two away. Before he leaves town, he’ll repair a sidewalk near the San Jose Hotel and one near Chipotle on South Lamar. If you spot Ememem at work, please respect his right to preserve his membership in the worldwide street artist protection program.
Mosaic Fest actually brought an impressive line-up of more than a dozen mosaic celebrities together to offer workshops and add several new installations about town. Mosaic Fest’s website features an interactive map to find their locations.
One concentrated locale is an unsightly, overflowing-dumpster-lined alleyway to the east of Rainey Street. Walls on one side of Conduit Alley burst with colorful murals nearing completion.
Above: Art underway in Conduit Alley on the east side of Rainey Street as part of Mosaic Fest 2025
Back to my flacker-stalking. Earlier this year, we happened upon numerous Ememem repairs on sidewalks in Paris, France.
Above: Sidewalk mosaics by Ememem spotted in Paris, France, in 2025.
And, below find my post about sightings in other cities from August 2024: “Vigilante ‘Street Doctor’ flacks cracks.”
This mosaic underfoot in Marseille caught my attention, with no expectation of future encounters. Then we started bumping into similar tileworks in Lyon, where they transform annoying potholes, sidewalk trip-zones and missing chunks from buildings clipped by careless drivers into works of art.
As it turns out, the artist, who refers to himself as Ememem, is a native of Lyon. Ememem terms his work “flacking.” Flaque means puddle in French, but, instead of puddling, his hole-plugging repairs assume the role of a puddle-displacement public service.
With no permits acquired, the stealth tiler applies his utilitarian craft in the middle of the night. His potential “canvases” are limitless, as what urban setting is without an over-abundance of cracks? As flacking checks off one of their Sisyphean chores, city maintenance workers respectfully opt to leave the unauthorized art untouched.
Above: Ememem mosaic patches in Lyon, France
I thought we spotted a fair amount of his handiwork in Lyon, each urban intervention bringing a smile to my face. That was before I learned the number of his patches in his hometown approaches 400.
Later to our surprise, one popped up in front of us in a sidewalk in the Kadikoy neighborhood of Istanbul. They now formed a thread tidily tying our travels together.
In Amsterdam, our final stop on this spring trip, I fully expected to find more of Ememem’s playful mosaics. Scour as I might as we wandered, I failed to spot a one. I was as disappointed as a child unable to spy Waldo in a crowd in her book.
Wherever we journey afoot now, I’ll be on the watch. If you find any, let me know.
Postcards from Barton Springs 