From above, it reads like a print. A crest of white and blue curls over itself, the foam breaking into claws, exactly as it has on countless posters since the 1830s. Come closer and the pixels have bolts, rust and scratches: they are road signs. Stop, give way, no entry, speed limits, pulled out of service and laid flat on the sand.
Italian artist Maurizio Sergiusti, known as Scoobafish, is building Urban Pixel, a land art project made entirely of decommissioned road signs. Its first chapter, The Last Wave, reinterprets Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa directly on a beach in Sardinia, with close to 1,000 recovered signs placed by hand so that the image only comes together when seen from the air.
Pixels with a past
The signs are not repainted, cut or altered in any way. Their factory colours, reflective film, dents and oxidation stay visible, and that is the point. Objects designed to give orders, to slow us down and tell us where to turn lose their function and become a palette. Each one keeps its own history while working as a single dot in a much larger picture.
At the centre of the composition Sergiusti places a rotting apple, a small and slightly unsettling detail that shifts the wave from Edo period print to a comment on consumption and what it leaves behind. This tsunami, after all, is made of what we throw away.
Built to disappear
The Last Wave will stand on the beach for a few hours, then be taken apart sign by sign until nothing is left on site. Aerial photography and film will be the only permanent version of the work.
Before the final installation, the artist ran a series of full scale tests to study colour relationships, density, overlaps and how readable the image is from above. The tests also revealed a second life after dark: under artificial light the reflective surfaces switch on one by one, and the wave turns into a scatter of glowing fragments.
We like projects that let the material speak, and here the material does most of the talking. A road sign is perhaps the most ignored piece of graphic design we live with, seen every day and never really looked at. Turned face up on the sand, it finally is. That it will be gone by evening only makes the image stronger.
Project: Urban Pixel, Chapter I: The Last Wave
Artist: Scoobafish (Maurizio Sergiusti)
Location: Sardinia, Italy
Images: © Scoobafish, Maurizio Sergiusti
Via: designboom
