Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

gulliver's bunny

This weekend I ran across the oddest public art installation I’ve seen in a while: a giant pink stuffed bunny in the Italian countryside. “Hase” is the work of gelitin, a four-person art group based in Austria.

The artists describe the project thusly on their Web site:

Rabbit
The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent;
and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.
The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbit’s body, a country dropped from the sky;
ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines.
Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel.
Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.
Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.
i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

It’s just so … weird.

Unveiled last fall, the giant knit stuffed rabbit will be on display for the next twenty years near Artesina, Italy. I’m curious if it’s just been left out in the open to decay, or if it’s being covered up at night and in inclement weather to extend its lifespan.