Who Is Changing the Roadworks Signs in Zürich?

01. This is not my work

Let me start with the only thing that really matters here: the signs are not mine. I didn't make them, I didn't commission them, nobody hired us. Somebody in Zürich goes out and redraws the little man on the roadworks signs, and I have been photographing that person's work without ever having met them.

Between 14 August and 22 September 2026 I catalogued 23 different signs, in 45 photographs, walking around the city. The sign is always the standard Swiss one: red equilateral triangle, white face, a black worker bent over his shovel and his heap of earth. What changes is who is holding the shovel.

What makes them so good is the discipline. Always black on white, always inside the border, always in the exact language of the original pictogram. You don't see a sticker slapped on a sign. You see that the man is different today.

02. The catalogue so far

Eighteen of the twenty-three carry a character I can name:

• The badger — striped face, still digging. Found three times.
• The wolf — a husky's head on the worker's shoulders. Three times.
• The witch — pointed hat, a wand throwing a star, a crescent moon and three stars overhead, and a small dog at her feet. Three times.
• The ladybug — a red shell with black spots, antennae, digging like everyone else.
• The rooster — tail feathers up, and beside him, handwritten on the sign: CUCURUCUCU ELEMAAA!!!
• The dolphin — the whole upper body replaced, shovel still in hand.
• The octopus — tentacles curling out of the worker's head.
• The squid face — tentacles hanging where the mouth should be. Twice.
• The stag — a full set of antlers.
• The panther — an entire black cat, tail and all, standing where the man was.
• The rabbit — two long ears, and a green dot somebody stuck on the sign.
• The elephant — ear and trunk, unmistakable once you see it.
• The bird of prey — a hooked beak and a wing instead of an arm.
• The long-beaked bird — a heron, or an ibis, digging on a shutter covered in graffiti.
• The goat — long muzzle and a tail. Some days I think it's a fox.
• Another long-snouted one — related to the elephant, but not the same animal.
• The one in a flat cap — no animal at all, just a worker who got a hat.
• The one with a single googly eye — and this is my favourite. I photographed this sign eight times. On 14 August the worker has no eye. By 31 August a plastic googly eye is stuck to his head. I have no idea who put it there, and that turns out to be the interesting part.

The remaining five are signs where I found the drawing already buried: under layers of stickers, under a wall of spray paint, or scratched off. I keep them in the catalogue because the count should be honest — not every hunt ends with an animal.

One I had to throw out. A round "no pedestrians" sign where the walking man had a head that wasn't his: close up, it turned out to be a printed sticker of someone's face, not a drawing. Different vandal, different intention.

03. Once one person starts, everybody feels invited

Here is the thing I did not expect to find, and the reason I kept photographing.

A modified sign almost never stays alone. Fifteen of my twenty-three signs carry somebody else's mark as well — a sticker, a marker tag, a spray scribble, right there on the sign face — and five of those are so covered that the drawing underneath is barely readable. The signs where only one hand has been are a minority.

And these are clearly not all the same person. Whoever draws the animals works inside the rules of the pictogram: black on white, inside the red border, in the same visual language the sign was printed in. The rest don't bother. A tag goes straight across the worker's body. A round sticker lands on his chest. A band promotes a gig. Some of the marks aren't even about the sign — the FCZ lettering you find on several of them is the football club's language, sprayed all over this city on every kind of surface; the triangle just happened to be in the way.

What seems to happen is that the first intervention breaks a spell. The sign stops reading as municipal property — untouchable, official, somebody else's — and starts reading as a surface that is already in play. Once there is a drawing inside the triangle, everybody feels a little more entitled to add their bit: to tag it, to sticker it, to retouch it, to finish someone else's joke. Permission spreads.

I want to be careful about what I can actually prove here, because it is tempting to tell a neater story than the photographs support. I photographed three signs twice. Two of them did not change at all between visits — six days on one, nine on the other. The third is the one with the eye: on 14 August it had a tag and a pink spray scribble and no eye; on 31 August the googly eye was there. So something was added to a sign that had already been drawn on and tagged — and I cannot tell you by whom. It could be the person who drew the animals, coming back. It could be somebody else entirely, joining in. A stuck-on plastic eye isn't even the same technique as the drawings, which makes me lean towards a second hand, but leaning is not knowing.

That uncertainty is the observation, not a gap in it. These triangles have become collective. There is no single author to find, no chronology to reconstruct from the outside — only a surface that several people, with very different manners, have each decided belongs a little bit to them. What I can still tell apart is the manners: one of the voices is trying to be funny in the sign's own language, and it is the only one that is.

04. Why it matters to me

Zürich is a city of rules, and the rules mostly work. The trams arrive at the minute printed on the board. The pavements are clean. Everything on the street is there for a reason, and it tells you the reason: where to walk, where to stop, what is forbidden, who is watching. I have a lot of affection for that competence — but there are days when a city that always behaves can feel like a room with no windows open.

These signs open a window. Somebody took the most bureaucratic object on the street, the one that exists purely to say careful, works ahead, and drew a joke inside it. No signature, no brand, no QR code, nothing asked of me in return. The joke is only for whoever happens to look up.

So now I walk differently. I catch myself checking every roadworks sign on my way somewhere, hoping today is a day I find a new one. Twenty-three in five weeks means I am not finding them by luck any more; I'm hunting. That small change in how I move through the city is what this whole thing is about. It is not a lot, and it is not nothing: a crack in the rigidity, opened by someone I don't know.

05. I'm looking for the artist

I would very much like to find whoever draws the animals.

Not to expose anyone — if they want to stay anonymous, that is the right answer and I'll respect it completely. I'd like to say thank you. I'd like to credit them properly here, on the page about their own work. And I'd like to ask whether they mind me photographing it and putting it together like this. I would also love to know how much of what I found is theirs, and how much is other people answering them.

If you know who draws on the roadworks signs in Zürich, please write to me: hi@algazal.co. If you are the artist: the same address, and thank you.

06. What I made from it

None of the typologies in the index fits this, and filing it as one of our works would be a small lie. So it sits here as an observation. What is mine is the way of looking — and three films.

The catalogue. Forty-five photographs, different streets, different days, different distances. One by one they are snapshots. Stacked with the sign held perfectly still, they become a single sign, in a single place, that keeps transforming while Zürich flickers around it like weather. If the sign never moves and everything else does, you stop looking at the street and start looking at what people have done to it.

No editing programme can hold a sign that still, so I wrote a small one. It measures the six edges of the red border in every photograph and works out the transformation that lands each sign exactly on an ideal triangle. In the finished film the sign sits a median of 0.07 pixels from where it should be. The proof is the image at the top of this page: average every frame into one and the sign stays sharp while the city dissolves into a ghost.

Two things in it are not photographs, and I would rather say so than have you wonder. The long pause is video — the ladybug sign on a tripod, locked by the same program, a cyclist crossing behind it. And the last five seconds are made with AI: the camera pulls back from the octopus sign and every worker on the site has an octopus head. On a page about who did what, that distinction matters.

The music is written in code, sample by sample — nothing recorded, nothing borrowed. A building site playing techno: a hammer on a steel plate where the hi-hat would be, a dull kick on every beat, and a bass figure in A minor that stops and holds when the film stops.

Then two jokes of my own, made with the same tool and one rule borrowed from the artist: it has to happen in the sign's own language.

The havaiana — a Schule sign, two children running to school. I filmed it handheld, locked the sign frame by frame, and redrew the figures as a cut-out puppet in the pictogram's own black: a mother and a child. The mother throws a flip-flop. The first one misses. The second one doesn't. Then both snap back as if nothing had happened, except for the havaiana left lying on the ground line. At the end, by pure chance, a real mother and child walk under the sign.

The funk — the round "no pedestrians" sign from the catalogue, the one I threw out because the head was a printed sticker, not a drawing. It got a second chance. I cut the painted man into his own pieces, kept the sticker as his head, and made him a puppet. He waves hello, grooves a little, and the moment the chorus of Bum Bum Tam Tam lands on its first bumbum, he drops into a twerk. Then he stands up, waves goodbye and goes back to walking.

07. Where, when, with whom

Zürich, Switzerland. 23 signs catalogued between 14 August and 22 September 2026, and still counting — I photograph them as I find them.

The drawings are the work of an artist I have not yet found, and some of what is on those signs is the work of people I will never identify. The photographs, the alignment tool, the music and the three films are mine; the closing shot of the catalogue film was generated with AI, and the song in the funk is Bum Bum Tam Tam by MC Fioti. If you know who draws them, or if you are them: hi@algazal.co.