Parisians, you may have already spotted the pretty colors of the manhole covers in the capital. Behind these joyful shimmering drops, a street artist who particularly appreciates “putting a little color in a dirty, gray thing that nobody pays attention to”. “And then, she adds, seeing me sitting for an hour in the middle of a sidewalk challenges passers-by to take their time to wander around and observe the small details of the Parisian streets”.
Like children who paint pavements that are too gray with chalk, Mélanie behind the Instagram account @lestrottoirs has made manhole covers the center of her street-art works. This Parisian journalist began by observing others. “I started this account in 2016 and at first I was spotting quirky things on sidewalks and taking pictures of them with my feet showing.”
“When I paint, I think of nothing else”
Mélanie started her own work about two and a half years ago, “after discussions on Instagram with the artist Flix Robotico, a Venezuelan based in Portugal, who creates quite a few very graphic works on the walls. He had painted a few plaques, in connection with an exhibition he had done at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, and the idea seemed nice to me”. She also confides that she had a click when she met in the south of France, an association which wrote environmental messages on manholes, so as not to waste water or throw anything away.
Equipped with acrylic paint, “which is easily erased”, she settles in according to her wanderings and her travels in the middle of the urban space and then immerses herself completely in her project: “like a puzzle, when I paint, I don’t think of anything else and it makes me feel good”. She also confides that the support of sidewalks was naturally imposed. “It so happened that after a few months of painting the manhole covers, I was contacted by a foundry, which turned out to be my great-grandfather’s. Something I didn’t know.”
This tenuous link to her grandfather is a nod that she likes to tell about her journey. “I knew that my great-grandfather had a foundry near Lyon around the 1950s. I had repainted some plates that belong to the EJ foundry, which is located near Beauvais. They contacted me and told me that their head office was near Lyon. And talking with them, I realized that they were installed in the premises of the old foundry of my great-grandfather. »
“It gives meaning to Parisian urban life”
And how do people look in all of this? “At the beginning, I had fears but the passers-by quickly showed enthusiasm and challenged by my creations”. She adds that the support of the sidewalk, “on the ground, it’s dirty, nobody looks”, surely facilitated her project, like the use of brushes and markers, and not spray paint. “Because I don’t paint on walls, my art is rarely seen as degradation, unlike other street-art works. I regularly have people who stop for 10-15 minutes, often when they have children, who are very curious”.
If she counts the negative reactions on the fingers of one hand in two and a half years, Mélanie rightly confides that the reaction of passers-by pushed her to persevere in her project. “It gives meaning to Parisian urban life, beauty to Paris, which is often described as an aggressive environment. In Paris, you don’t find very original models of manhole covers, but the color makes it possible to highlight superb covers which, unpainted, go completely unnoticed”. A little sweetness in a world of brutes? Rather a touch of poetry and colors in a very gray environment.