Nearly 1,000 decommissioned road signs are being assembled by Italian artist Maurizio Sergiusti, known as Scoobafish, on a Sardinian beach for Urban Pixel: Chapter I, The Last Wave. The temporary land art project uses the signs as physical pixels to reinterpret Hokusai’s The Great Wave, shifting a familiar image from the language of print into the landscape itself.
The road signs are not painted, cut or otherwise materially altered for the installation. Their original colors, reflective surfaces, scratches, rust and other traces of use remain visible. Once designed for a practical role within road infrastructure, they are removed from that context and arranged as individual components of a much larger image.
The composition is intended to be read from above, making aerial photography and film an important part of how the project is documented. On the ground, the signs remain individual objects, each carrying evidence of its previous use. From above, they become part of a single image, with their colors and shapes contributing to the reconstruction of Hokusai’s wave.
At the center of the composition is a decaying apple. It introduces another visual element into the installation, connecting the imagery to ideas of consumption, waste and consequence without changing the fundamental structure of the work. The wave and apple are constructed from the same recovered material, bringing together two recognizable forms through an unlikely medium.
The project is deliberately temporary. Once the installation has been completed and documented, the signs are removed from the beach. The physical work therefore exists only for a limited period, while aerial photography and film preserve its final arrangement.
Before the full installation, Sergiusti developed a series of full-scale tests to examine color relationships, density, overlapping, scale and how clearly the image could be read from above. These studies also considered the reflective qualities of the signs under different lighting conditions. At night, illumination produces another visual reading as the reflective surfaces become more pronounced.
This treatment of the material is central to Urban Pixel. The signs are not made uniform in order to create a clean image. Their differences are retained. Rust, scratches, faded areas and reflective surfaces remain part of the composition, allowing the individual histories of the objects to coexist with the larger image they collectively form.
The project also changes the relationship between infrastructure and landscape. Road signs normally operate within an environment of movement, instruction and regulation. Here, they are removed from that functional setting and placed on a beach, where their original purpose no longer determines how they are read. Their scale, color and material qualities instead become the elements through which the landscape is temporarily reorganized.
The Last Wave is the first chapter of Sergiusti’s ongoing Urban Pixel project, which uses discarded urban materials as components for large-scale temporary compositions. The Sardinian installation extends that approach from individual objects into land art, using the accumulation of hundreds of separate elements to create a single image.
The result depends on a simple but significant shift in perception: a road sign stops functioning as a road sign and becomes a visual unit. Hundreds of these units then move from the scale of infrastructure to the scale of landscape. What remains after the installation is dismantled is not the physical arrangement itself, but its documentation and the memory of how these discarded objects briefly occupied the coast as something else.
Fact File
Project: Urban Pixel: Chapter I, The Last Wave
Artist: Maurizio Sergiusti, known as Scoobafish
Location: Sardinia, Italy
Typology: Land Art Installation
Material: Decommissioned road signs
Scale: Nearly 1,000 road signs
Reference: Hokusai’s The Great Wave
Duration: Temporary
Documentation: Aerial photography and film
Official website: https://scoobafish.com/urban-
