Rabbit drawing © GELITIN

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Rabbit drawing © GELITIN

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Rabbit seen from the sky © GELITIN

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Rabbit during construction © GELITIN

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Rabbit © GELITIN. 2005-2025

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Yesterday afternoon while I was cleaning my library, I stumbled upon this “not brand new but crazy” project by GELITIN (ALI JANKA, WOLFGANG GANTNER, FLORIAN REITHER, and TOBIAS URBAN).

As Austria’s premier artist’s collective, they have, since they started working together in the mid-90s, literally turned the art world into a giant playground. DIY constructions evincing varying degrees of rationality, their works leave plenty of room for improvisation and for the participation and above all, moods of spectators. Practicing their own unique brand of performance-based happening inspired interventions, the rethink the parameters of art: “It doesn’t matter whether you think our work is good or bad. The question is does it have an effect on you? Does it confront you with something new? Does it make you think“.

While their work can be found in galleries and museums, GELITIN‘s most remarkable productions remain their installations and performances. Like this giant pink bunny – 60 meters long and 6 meters high- knitted by grandmothers over the course of five year and placed near the village of Cuneo in Italy in 2005. Because of its size, this installation reverses human perspective and enters into a dialogue with a distorted perception of space that reminds us of childhood.

Let the parents, i.e. artist collective GELITIN speak:

“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 a­s 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 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 until 2025. For more details how to get there, please check the artists’ website: http://www.gelitin.net

On my to do list for sure!