Photo: Facebook / Baadal Nanjundaswamy
Sometimes, the only way in which you can get civic authorities to listen to you and actually solve a problem is to make a viral video. Just ask Baadal Nanjundaswamy, a very famous Indian performance artist.
Nanjundaswamy lives in Bengaluru and his latest project involves the Tunga Nagar Main Road, which is so riddled with potholes it hardly resembles a road anymore. Still, it carries heavy traffic and civic authorities didn’t seem too concerned about that or the kind of damage this did to the cars.
So Nanjundaswamy took it upon himself to make a statement: he got himself an astronaut suit and got dressed, and then made a video in which it seems as if he’s walking on the Moon. Only when the video pans out do you see that he’s actually walking down a street with considerable traffic, as you see cars pass by and you hear the noise they make.
“Hello BBMP Commissioner,” Nanjundaswamy wrote in the caption. The BBMP “or the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike is the administrative body responsible for civic amenities and certain infrastructural assets,” India Today says.
The video went viral both in India and internationally, getting tens of thousands of views in the first hours alone. Proving that social media can be a platform for change, Nanjundaswamy’s next upload came about 24 hours later, showing an excavator digging up exactly the same portion of the street the artist had fake-moonwalked on. Repairs are heavily underway.
As awesome as this work from Nanjundaswamy is, he has done even more incredible stuff in the past. His goal is to use performance art to get the attention of civic authorities, so when he’s not painting potholes he’s doing other stunts that work in this sense. Like that one time when he placed a life-size crocodile in a huge pothole in the middle of the street.
The constant in his work is, you guessed it, potholes.
So Nanjundaswamy took it upon himself to make a statement: he got himself an astronaut suit and got dressed, and then made a video in which it seems as if he’s walking on the Moon. Only when the video pans out do you see that he’s actually walking down a street with considerable traffic, as you see cars pass by and you hear the noise they make.
“Hello BBMP Commissioner,” Nanjundaswamy wrote in the caption. The BBMP “or the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike is the administrative body responsible for civic amenities and certain infrastructural assets,” India Today says.
The video went viral both in India and internationally, getting tens of thousands of views in the first hours alone. Proving that social media can be a platform for change, Nanjundaswamy’s next upload came about 24 hours later, showing an excavator digging up exactly the same portion of the street the artist had fake-moonwalked on. Repairs are heavily underway.
As awesome as this work from Nanjundaswamy is, he has done even more incredible stuff in the past. His goal is to use performance art to get the attention of civic authorities, so when he’s not painting potholes he’s doing other stunts that work in this sense. Like that one time when he placed a life-size crocodile in a huge pothole in the middle of the street.
The constant in his work is, you guessed it, potholes.
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