discarded road signs transform into monumental land art installation on sardinian shore

Decommissioned road signs turn into physical pixels for land art

Urban Pixel is an ongoing land art project by Italian contemporary artist Maurizio Sergiusti, known as Scoobafish, in which authentic decommissioned road signs are transformed into physical pixels for monumental temporary installations. Chapter I, The Last Wave, reinterprets Hokusai’s Great Wave directly within the Sardinian landscape.

Nearly 1,000 recovered road signs will be assembled by hand on a beach to form the image when viewed from above. The signs are not painted, cut, or materially altered. Their original colors, reflective surfaces, scratches, rust, and traces of use remain visible. Objects once designed to regulate movement, communicate instructions, and organise the urban environment are removed from their functional context and become components of a new visual language.

The Last Wave turns nearly 1,000 road signs into physical pixels | all images ©Scoobafish – Maurizio Sergiusti

Urban Pixel shifts discarded objects into monumental landscape

At the center of the composition, a decaying apple introduces a reflection on consumption, waste and consequence. The familiar image of the wave is therefore transformed into a contemporary landscape constructed from the material remains of everyday infrastructure. The installation by artist Maurizio Sergiusti (Scoobafish) is deliberately ephemeral. It will exist on the beach for only a few hours before being completely dismantled, with every road sign removed from the site.

Aerial photography and film become the permanent record of an artwork designed to disappear. Before the final installation, Sergiusti has carried out a series of full-scale physical tests to study color relationships, density, overlapping, scale, and aerial readability.

The tests also explore how the reflective surfaces of road signs transform under different lighting conditions, producing a second visual interpretation at night. Each recovered sign retains its individual history while simultaneously becoming part of a much larger image. This shift in perception, from discarded object to pixel, and from individual fragment to monumental landscape, forms the central visual system of Urban Pixel.

the artist inside the full-scale test provides a sense of the installation’s physical scale

human presence highlights the relationship between individual road signs and the overall image

the reverse sides of recovered road signs retain rust, scratches, oxidation and traces of their previous lives

fragments of familiar urban signage become individual elements in Urban Pixel’s visual language

at night, artificial light reveals a second reading of the installation as individual signs emerge from the darkness

project info:

name: Urban Pixel — Chapter I: The Last Wave
designer: Scoobafish – Maurizio Sergiusti

location: Sardinia, Italy

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edited by: Christina Vergopoulou | designboom