Samudra’s latest creative venture – on video and in two photo slideshows. Let yourself be surprised! (Exhibition opens 2 July in Le Conquet, Brittany, France)
Ten years ago we spoke with Samudra about her work as an eco-designer in Aesthetic and creative eco-design, and in 2017 we introduced her memoir, The Freedom of Having Nothing. Now we catch up with her latest creative venture: murals – paste-ups, to be precise, made from collage and taken onto the street. Her exhibition, De Collage à Street Art, opens on 2 July at the Mairie du Conquet in Brittany, France.
Samudra describes herself as a multidisciplinary creative. After years as an eco-designer – building clothing and accessory collections from repurposed materials for the international fashion scene – and a stint teaching design students that intelligent design means transforming what already exists rather than adding new raw materials and waste to the planet, she turned her philosophy of repurposing toward a new medium: images.
Having travelled widely and built up a vast personal image bank, she wanted to create new narratives from pre-existing visuals. She had always made collages, but the first one of real significance came together during the first 2020 lockdown – a piece measuring five by one metres. She tried turning the work into wallpaper, “targeting the interior design market for restaurants and cafés – a trend that was quite popular in Milan at the time” – and later made larger collages and approached galleries, but neither route gained much traction.
“That was really frustrating for me,” she says – so she decided to take her work into public space instead. Posters can’t legally go up on walls, of course, but she went ahead anyway, “partly just for fun at first.” She found a printer to digitise her collages and reproduce them in panels on cheap billboard-style paper, then scouted Milan for a suitable wall – ideally one without surveillance cameras, which she found “extremely hard” to come by, and where pedestrians would actually pause rather than just drive past.
One morning at 7 a.m. she put up her first poster near the Prada Foundation, guerrilla-style, in under three minutes. “That first attempt was a bit clumsy,” she admits, but the experience – the adrenaline, the hunt for the right urban spot, and above all seeing her images at an entirely new scale – changed her relationship to the work completely.
Asked what her collages bring to the public space, she contrasts them with what usually fills city walls: billboards trying to sell something, or graffiti thrown up in a hurry. Her own work, she says, “uses the language of poetry; it doesn’t seek to SELL anything.” There’s no slogan, no political message. “My goal is to bring beauty, poetry, and colour to gray, unattractive public spaces, turning them into places of interest,” she says.
The project soon outgrew Milan. Having lived on several continents, Samudra began asking friends elsewhere to put up posters on her behalf, on one condition – that they send a photograph for an online gallery. Hence the name: Artexplosion, an interactive, global project for which she now puts together kits containing paste, a poster and tutorials on choosing a wall, applying the paste and photographing the result. International shipping hasn’t been entirely smooth – packages have occasionally been seized by customs in Mexico and Japan, the powdered paste apparently looking suspicious. To date her posters have appeared in seven countries and sixteen cities, from Switzerland to Mexico, Rome to Ibiza, Austria to France – linking distant places through a shared image.
Anonymity has been part of the appeal, since fly-posting carries fines, and a QR code on each poster now does the work of identifying her instead, directing passers-by to the online gallery and a way to make contact.
Her materials are entirely analogue – old and new magazines, books of all kinds, cut by hand with scissors and glued, with no computer involved. “My work is very intuitive,” she says; shapes, colours and textures come together spontaneously, sometimes carrying a hidden story or association. A series made in Mexico, for instance, draws on the iconography of the vanished Toltec civilisation.
The legal status of her work has shifted with geography. After fly-posting illegally across European cities, she spent six months in Mexico, where the practice sits within a long tradition of muralism and is fully authorised. More recently, having moved to Mallorca, she found similar tolerance there. Her first fully legal installation, however, came as a public commission from Le Conquet, at the tip of Finistère in Brittany, where she has family roots.
With six months’ lead time, she tested various surfaces for weather resistance and created paste-ups celebrating Breton culture, bringing together the animal and plant worlds with personal and collective themes. Using a cherry picker, she produced one piece measuring six by six metres – at the cost, she says, of several physically demanding days suspended over ten metres up in a harness. In all, ninety square metres were pasted across the town, work that was warmly received by local residents.
A separate article will soon showcase Samudra’s mini-collages. She pastes them onto whatever she finds – driftwood, giant Pacific oysters… “I love creating series of 20 to 30 pieces – mini-collages – and leaving them behind in the environment where I found the materials. Whoever finds them can take them home. It’s essentially ‘free art’ for everyone – my own way of sharing my creativity – and again: it’s interactive; there’s a little QR code.”
Looking ahead, Samudra’s most heartfelt wish is to return to Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, where she once lived (see Autumn in Kharkiv) – to bring colour and poetry to damaged buildings once the war ends, “while waiting for the reconstruction, which will take a long time.” Art’s role, she says, is precisely that: to transform how we see our surroundings, and to reach the part of us that makes us human.
De Collage à Street Art opens with a conference at 6 pm on 2 July 2026 at the Mairie du Conquet’s Salle des Fêtes, followed at 7 p.m. by the exhibition’s vernissage at the Espace Tissier, Mairie du Conquet, 23 rue du Lieutenant-Jourden, 29217 Le Conquet, Brittany, France.
More on: QR code or katellgelebart.com – Samudra on Osho News
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