For one week only Red Bull was handed the keys to the Natural History Museum and turned the iconic museum into a skatepark.
A host of Red Bull skaters including, six time X-Games Gold Medalist, Leticia Bufoni, rising star Lore Bruggeman and Argentina’s Aldana Bertran, skated amongst many of the museum’s 80 million artifacts. This once in a lifetime skate session in a truly unique setting was captured in partnership with Canon.
With the help of legendary skatepark designer Joe Ciaglia, the museum’s prominent exhibitions including the Minerals Hall and the iconic Hintze Hall, complete with Hope the whale, were transformed into skate-friendly areas overnight, with ramps and railings set up across the building to take advantage of the natural architecture in the space. The trio of skaters were joined by skate legend Margie Didal and together they scoped out the whole museum to skate spots that no-one will ever skate again.
Between 10pm and 5am the usually forbidden areas were turned into stunning locations for Leticia, Lore and Aldana to become the first people to skate in the Natural History Museum. The three of them took on benches in Minerals Hall, sessioned the rails at the entrance to the museum and freestyled across a tank containing a crocodile, before finally creating a mega ramp down the main stairs of Hintze Hall to kickflip over a velociraptor skeleton.
Red Bull skate athlete Leticia Bufoni said: “It was a historic moment for the skate scene. We are used to being kicked out of museums or their grounds, but on this occasion the Natural History Museum allowed us to come inside and create a park around their stuff. They had obviously never had ramps in there so it was cool to create them all and skate this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I was pretty nervous skating around their artifacts. We were taking big risks to avoid damaging them. It was certainly one of the craziest nights of my life.”
Red Bull partnered with Canon to bring the project to life, utilising a broad range of cutting-edge imaging technology to capture all of the skate action inside the Natural History Museum.
