That’s one small step for man … one giant leap for street-artist kind.
An Indian street artist is winning social media acclaim after his viral video of an astronaut “moonwalking” past several potholes prompted the city of Bengaluru to fix the problem.
The video shows a man dressed as an astronaut taking several slow, seemingly low-gravity steps across the rubble-strewn shoulder of a street in Bengaluru, in southern India.
The footage starts at a high angle so that it appears the astronaut is walking on the moon. It moves down to eye level within a few seconds, just as a car rumbles past in the background. Vehicles continue to drive by for the remainder of the 44-second clip.
Artist Baadal Nanjundaswamy and actor Poornachandra Mysore teamed up to record their “moonwalk” for Twitter over the weekend, in an attempt to shame the city to fix the street. Nanjundaswamy’s video of the performance has been watched more than 1.2 million times since it was posted on Twitter Saturday.
“I happened to see many pothole-ridden roads in the city, but the condition of this road is quite shocking,” Nanjundaswamy told the Bangalore Mirror.
The artist has created more than two dozen public art projects to highlight city infrastructure issues in the past. He acknowledged that he had to dress up the scene a little bit with paint, but the rocks and potholes were already there.
“The residents were very cooperative,” he said. “Some of them even regulated the movement of vehicles on the road so that we could convert a pothole into a moon surface.”
Mysore says he agreed to don the spacesuit because the road was in very bad shape.
“It needs to be fixed immediately,” he said.
Nanjundaswamy tagged several city officials in his initial tweet.
He shared a second video of the scene on Tuesday, in which he thanked city leaders for taking action in response to his video. His second video showed backhoes removing rubble from the site of his moonwalk.
“Work in progress,” Nanjundaswamy wrote. “Quick and prompt response…. Thank you people for such an overwhelming response and support!”
Comments