Walking on the Moon: IIT Kanpur 2026 began with published maps of the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity and a deceptively simple question: how much ground did Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually cover while walking on the Moon?

Using the scale of the mapped routes and Armstrong’s documented excursion to Little West Crater as reference points, the path of the astronauts’ movements was reconstructed at 1:1 scale. The resulting drawing measured approximately seventy-five meters across at its widest point. It was laid out as a temporary line on the Main Auditorium Lawn at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, where visitors could enter the work and follow the path for themselves.

The distance between Earth and the Moon is approximately 386,000 kilometers. The area explored during the Apollo 11 excursion spanned under 100 meters, small enough to cross on foot in a matter of minutes. Placed side by side, these distances unsettle any easy sense of scale. The journey remains largely abstract, while the area walked can be encountered directly through the body.

From the edge of the lawn, the line appeared as a drawing or diagram. Once inside it, the route arrived gradually. A map presents every movement at once. A walker encounters one segment at a time, through turns, returns, changes in direction, and the accumulation of steps. Through walking, the historical record becomes embodied location and duration. Participants could feel the scale of the lunar excursion rather than understand it solely through a historic image or abstract number.

A direct catalyst for the project was Babak Fakhamzadeh’s essay “The Streets Beneath the Stars,” received through Walk Listen Create in April 2026. The essay considers the familiar image of astronauts walking on the Moon as a carefully controlled movement presented as a universal human gesture. The extraordinary political, economic, military, and technological systems supporting that movement largely disappear from the image.

I was drawn to the tension between a walk commonly understood as belonging to humanity and an experience available firsthand to only two people. Transferring their paths to IIT Kanpur shifted the terms of access. The measurements remained constant, while the terrain, bodies, gravity, national context, and institutional setting changed. A movement once performed on the lunar surface could be taken up by people walking together across an ordinary campus lawn.

The location also brought the route into another technological and institutional environment. IIT Kanpur has its own structures of expertise, permission, infrastructure, and movement. The lawn offered a shared space within that larger system. Walking the lunar trace there connected an iconic history of exploration with the daily movements of students, faculty, staff, and visitors.

The public presentation was brief, and only around 90 people encountered the ground drawing firsthand. This limited access became part of how I understood the work. Apollo 11 was watched by an enormous mediated audience, but the lunar walk itself belonged to two people. Everyone else has encountered it through transmissions, photographs, stories, reproduced images, and the material objects that survived it.

I treated the artist-designed trifold brochures and project T-shirts as part of this temporal structure. The brochure contained the mapped route and information about its reconstruction. The shirt carried an emblem developed for the project, drawing loosely from the visual languages of NASA and ISRO, and the form of the lunar module footprint. Both were distributed during the event and left the lawn with the people who received them.

These objects create a modest material afterlife for the temporary drawing. Their role echoes the way spacesuits, mission patches, the return capsule, and other remnants continue to carry the memory of Apollo 11 after the event itself became inaccessible. For someone who walked the route at IIT Kanpur, a shirt or brochure could recall that experience. For someone who was not there, the same object could serve as evidence of an unfamiliar event and prompt a question about what had taken place.

Walking on the Moon uses rewalking as a form of historical inquiry. It carries a recorded movement into a new location and holds its scale steady while the surrounding conditions change. The temporary line gave a distant history a bodily and local form. The objects that remained allowed traces of that encounter to continue circulating after the lawn no longer held the drawing.

The project was developed during my Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award at IIT Kanpur and presented publicly on May 20 and 21, 2026.