Les Amoureux des Bancs Publics … Sète Street Art

One of the ‘must see’ things in Sète is the Musee Paul Valery. A native of the town, Valery was a renowned poet, philosopher, art critic and hero of the French Resistance in the Second World War. As well as housing a sizeable collection of Valery’s documents and artworks, the museum houses an art collection with over 700 paintings and more than a thousand drawings, including by Doré, Degas, Cézanne and Matisse.

It’s a must see that we didn’t see, but a couple of the works in the museum have escaped its confines to be found on the walls of Sète. Prominent amongst them is Joseph-Noël Sylvestre’s 1890 painting, The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Barbarians. As we made our way through the narrow streets up the hill from the town centre, a giant street art work called The Sack of Rome, only many times larger than the original, was on the side of a house.

As we walked around the historic centre of Sète, it became clear that there was a pretty big street art scene. Some of this is clearly organic, but some is brought to life through the K-Live Festival – a festival of street art that has been an annual event in Sète for the last 18 years. The festival’s goal is to create the Musée à Ciel Ouvert, MaCO for short, a literal open air museum. 

The result has been a flourishing of street art that paints a story along the canals, around the docks and through the tightly packed streets of the Quartier Haut. Known locally as Little Naples, this is the district where southern Italian migrants who came to work in the fishing industry settled. It still retains the heavy Italian influence of its working class roots, but it is definitely gentrifying.

Spread across the Quartier Haut are some of the largest street art works in the city, these included a striking piece influenced by Japanese art and with a provocative title, Les Amoureux des Bancs Publics, or Lovers on Public Benches. Elsewhere we found The Thinker, or to give him his full title, Le Penseur de Sète, and the slightly more surreal Les Cools Contes des Chiens de la Casse, or The Cool Tales of the Dogs of the Junkyard.

In Sète, the titles of the street art are almost as much fun as the works themselves. In normal times, I would have spent a morning hunting down the works of the MaCO, but these were not normal times. It was mid-August and daily temperatures were regularly hitting the high 30Cs and the Quartier Haut is built on a hill. Luckily, it’s a small area and we saw quite a lot just wandering aimlessly.

One place we had to visit though was the Rue de Tunis. If street art in the Quartier Haut is scattered far and wide, the Rue de Tunis has the largest concentration of artworks in the town. There’s a correlation between street art and urban gentrification, but at one end of the Rue de Tunis was a handmade sign warning unsuspecting camera-wielding tourists that this was still a rough area and to keep your wits about you.

From one end to the other, Rue de Tunis is covered in artworks. The whole street is a blaze of colour daubed on the walls. Many of the artworks have a nautical theme, and elements of the ocean and its inhabitants make their way surreptitiously into the images. There are so many artworks, and they often contain details that it takes a while to see, that you could spend quite a lot of time just on this one small street.

Rue de Tunis isn’t curated by the MaCO. Managed by the street association it draws a range of other artists and hosts a series of events like flea markets. The street is a lot of fun, but as the daytime drinkers, dogs on string gang that met us at one end of the street indicated, it’s worth keeping your wits about you. It’s always a joy to be in a place with an unexpected treasure trove of street art, Sète more than delivered.