They arrived on time, and the presentation was short: “Mme and Mr. Mud Apple ». They met in front of the Saint-Roch train station in Montpellier (Hérault), under the blazing sun of this late summer. The instructions had been sent in advance: no questions about their private lives, their first or last names, no photos where their faces could be seen. “Let’s talk about our works instead,” they wrote when accepting the interview.
Under the name of Pomme de Boue, and behind sunglasses, hides a duo of Ukrainian street artists, a man and a woman, refugees in Montpellier for two years. The Espace Saint-Ravy, a municipal place that supports Montpellier artists, hosts, until September 22, the exhibition “Perspective brisée”, bringing together ten of their works.
The couple arrived in Montpellier in June 2022, via Cologne, Germany, with only two backpacks for luggage. The artists fled Russia’s lightning invasion of kyiv, where they were exhibiting their work in a gallery in Podil, a trendy neighborhood in the north of the Ukrainian capital. At the time, the French newspaper Mosaic Magazine (which has since ceased its activity) offers them to come to an artist residency “to adorn the city.” Montpellier, which launched the MAUM (Montpellier Urban Arts Museum) in 2022 and inaugurated Parcelle473, a street art museum, in 2023, is giving its new Ukrainian residents a warm welcome.
Open air gallery
The collective Pomme de Boue (a playful nod to “potato”) was born in kyiv in 2018, in a decommunizing Ukraine that was grappling with the question of whether to remove or reimagine the massive Soviet mosaics hanging on walls across the country. “We wanted to offer a new approach, a breath of fresh air,” Mr. Mud Apple remembers.
The duo then decided to create abstract mosaics “which reflect the dynamics of urban life”, but also works in concrete and cardboard. In four years, the duo has made kyiv their open-air gallery. “We hung about three hundred mosaics in Podil and the city centre. Half of them have now disappeared or been destroyed,” explains Mme Mud Apple.
After the grey concrete buildings of kyiv, here they are among the orange and yellow facades of the Mediterranean. “In Montpellier, we have two bikes, two backpacks and a few friends,” counts Mr. Mud Apple. Strolling through the city on August 30, the artists show us their mosaics scattered throughout the city center.
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