Ememem’s Mosaic Repairs (10 Photos)

Ememem turns broken streets into mosaic art

Ememem fits mosaic tiles into cracks, potholes and broken steps, letting the damage determine each design. These ten works include a floral strip in Belgrade and an orange-and-yellow stair repair in Zagreb.

The anonymous French artist is based in Lyon and has been creating these mosaics, known as flacking, since 2016. Institut français describes the works as made-to-measure patches for public space.

💡 Nerd Fact: The name flacking comes from the French word flaque, meaning “puddle.” In an interview with ArtDog Istanbul, Ememem explains that the name refers to the works’ resemblance to pools of color. The individual pieces are called flacks.

🔗 Follow Ememem on Instagram and visit the official website.

More: Be The Change (17 Photos)

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🧩 Patterned Street Crack — By Ememem in Belgrade, Serbia 🇷🇸

Floral tiles and patterned squares run along a jagged opening in the asphalt. Pale blue rectangles form a straight border on one side, while the opposite edge follows the broken road. From this low angle, it looks like tiled flooring beneath the street.

In a 2024 interview with NIN, Ememem explained that the tiles are cut by hand to fit each damaged surface. The artist usually works late at night or early in the morning, when the streets are quiet enough to concentrate. The Belgrade interventions were part of an art project commissioned by Expo 2027.

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🪭 Red Tile Fan — By Ememem in Ankara, Türkiye 🇹🇷

Bands of bright red squares, patterned tiles and pale cut-out shapes spread between a round cover and the wall. The rows curve, widen and narrow around the damage. The red tiles stand out against the worn red pavement beside them.

The Ankara project brought Ememem to Çankaya in June 2025 through a collaboration between Institut français Ankara and Çankaya Municipality. This mosaic is at the junction of Paris Caddesi and Yazanlar Sokak, just before the steps, beside the French Embassy.

💡 Nerd Fact: Local residents contribute materials to Ememem’s work. In the artist’s interview about the Ankara project, Ememem describes people bringing broken, used tiles without being asked. For the artist, these fragments reflect the residents’ homes and personal tastes.

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🔺 Mosaic Among the Cobblestones — By Ememem in Ankara, Türkiye 🇹🇷

Red borders divide this patch into triangles filled with blue-and-white patterns, gold-colored pieces and smaller geometric details. It sits beside the playground in Kuğulu Park. Behind it, pigeons scatter across the cobblestones beneath strings of Turkish flags.

💡 Nerd Fact: The Ankara project includes five works. The organizer’s 2025 walking map illustrates each mosaic and its location: two in Kuğulu Park, one at Paris Caddesi and Yazanlar Sokak, one on Tunalı Hilmi Caddesi, and one outside the Doğan Taşdelen Contemporary Art Center.

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🔵 A Mosaic Collar — By Ememem in Ankara, Türkiye 🇹🇷

A round cover marked Türk Telekom sits inside curved rows of red, blue and pale tiles on the sidewalk at 94 Tunalı Hilmi Caddesi. At the outer edge, longer patterned pieces spread out like a fringe.

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💙 Blue Tile Patch — By Ememem in Lyon, France 🇫🇷

Cobalt rectangles, turquoise squares and small gold-colored pieces fill a narrow gap at a street corner. Cafés and pedestrians are visible farther along the street.

💡 Nerd Fact: Ememem made mosaics before starting to repair streets. In the artist’s account of how flacking began, the idea came during an artist residency in Lyon, while looking for a way to share that work with passersby. Ememem says the first intervention received local press coverage the following day.

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🌼 A Tiled Base for a Street Pole — By Ememem in Reims, France 🇫🇷

Outside Bibliothèque Carnegie on Place Carnegie, cream petal shapes spread from the base of a dark pole, surrounded by blue-and-white borders and small yellow tiles. The mosaic extends into the gaps between the paving stones, giving the patch an uneven outline.

For the Reims series, Ememem used reclaimed materials, including ancient mosaic pieces recovered during excavations at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. ALC Reims records this detail in its account of a walk led by the city’s head of cultural development.

💡 Nerd Fact: Bibliothèque Carnegie was built with a $200,000 grant from the Carnegie foundation. Its wrought-iron entrance doors won a gold medal at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris.

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📰 A Frame Around a Square Cover — By Ememem in Reims, France 🇫🇷

A square sewer cover sits inside a frame of pale strips, dark outlines and small colored shapes. Below it, black-and-white triangles form a fan around printed details, with narrow rainbow bands along the lower edge. The repeated lines echo the grid on the metal cover. The same mosaic appears from another angle in photographs from ALC Reims’s May 2025 art walks, with visitors gathered around it.

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📐 Pansement de rue — By Ememem in Reims, France 🇫🇷

At 8 Rue Thiers, long pale tiles give this square cover a broad frame. Smaller bands of blue, black and gold-colored pieces run across its upper and lower edges, ending where the asphalt breaks. The cover has a circular wave pattern of its own.

This mosaic appears in Radio Primitive’s photographic coverage of Reims’s urban Art Deco trail, inaugurated on April 11, 2025. Ememem was one of five artists invited to mark the centenary of Art Deco and the city’s reconstruction.

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🌿 Green Curves in the Asphalt — By Ememem in Lyon, France 🇫🇷

Curved rows of white circles cross green patterned tiles and brown borders inside a branching crack. The mosaic narrows to a thin tail near the shoes, then spreads into a much wider patch.

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🪜 A Broken Step Gets a Mosaic — By Ememem in Zagreb, Croatia 🇭🇷

Ememem made this repair for the 2023 Okolo art project, on the stairs in the Hotel Jägerhorn passage at Ilica 14. The comparison shows a missing corner filled with white, orange and yellow tiles. Dark lines divide the colors into a compact grid that continues across the tread and down the front face. In the larger photograph, a person in red trousers passes above the finished patch.

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Which one is your favorite?