As If Knitted By Giant Grandmothers

Todays' theme: Tuscan hillside stunts.

It's 200 ft. long, and pink, and dead, and a bunny, and on a hillside in Italy. And it will contnue to decompose for 20 years, and people are encouraged to climb on it and..

Yes, I'm serious.

The artist statement in full:

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 rabbitís 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.

As I mentioned before, I'm already delighted by the transformation of familiar landscapes into the unfamiliar. This is an amazing example of that - much less 'elegant' than a Christo and Jeanne-Claude piece, but fascinating because it's a) going to be up there rotting for two decades and b) it's in Italy - one of the most aesthetically conscious European countries. In case the poetry of the artist's intent threw you - the bunny is an ex-bunny, dead after dropping from the sky. Littered on the ground beside it are its figurative 'organs'. Upon its face is a frozen mask of terror. Dead, dead, supremely gone.

How did they get permission?
HOW? HOW?!

Ryan: "No way."
Lei: "Totally."
Ryan: "Can you find it on Google Earth?"
Lei: "Uhh..hmm..it doesn't.. GUH! YES! AHHHH! HAHAHAH!!! http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Artesina+in+Italy&t=k&om=1&ll=44.244277,7.769737&spn=0.014941,0.041327"

....ahh....!!!

yess....!!!

....hoo."

Put your cursor here for the Artists' page and...click.