the bunny you can see from space...
Yesterday we talked mini moles, today I'm going in the opposite direction altogether and talking something big.
Today I bring you a bunny so big you can see him from space!
Lying on the ground, with his mouth open in surprise, this 200 ft rabbit looks like he has been dropped from the heavens by a careless intergalactic toddler!
Hase / Rabbit / Coniglio -Artesina, Piemont, Italy 2005 - 2025
On Monday, September 19, 2005, tourists and local people in the North Italian village of Artesina, looked upward at a familiar mountainside and were amazed at what they saw there!
Stretched out along the slope at a height of 1600 meters was a gigantic pink bunny over 60 metres long and over 6 metres high!
“Hase” (ie 'Hare') was constructed by the Vienna art collective 'Gelitin' and is expected to remain on Colletto Fava Mountain until 2025 when cattle and weather will have devoured the giant bunny made from fabric and straw.
For those who look closely, this giant rabbit is not a children's toy after all. One side is split open and Hase's entrails are spilling out. Gelitin wants the audience to feel small as Gulliver did in his Travels when encountering the unknown and strange. Hikers are encouraged to climb onto Hase, settle down and relax for as long as they wish. Certainly Hase's entrails spilling down the hillside is a bit macabre and the sensation of an uncomfortable, mercurial dream lingers in the mist on the slopes of Colletto Fava.
The giant hare, took over five years to make. Knitted piece by pink piece by a legion of grannies employed by Gelitin...
They described their wonderful creation in 2005 saying -
"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 rabbitÌs 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.
After almost 5 years of knitting the rabbit found its final place in the italian alps (close to Cuneo). It waits there to be visited by you. You might even take your time or check back every now and then as the rabbit will wait for you 20 years from now on..."
You have until 2025 to get yourself over to Piedmont to see him before he wastes away and returns to the elements.
Failing that just get yourself onto google earth.
Trust me it's not hard to spot a bunny that big!
Queen Marie
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