In 2005 a giant pink knitted rabbit appeared on Colletto Fava mountain in Piedmont, Italy. Viennese art collective Gelitin knitted the 200-foot long rabbit over the course of 5 years. The pink bunny is knitted with soft, waterproof materials, and is stuffed with straw.
The huge outdoor sculpture, which is apparently visible from space, serves as a playful viewing platform; a giant pink belly from which hikers can appreciate the views of the surrounding countryside.
The rabbit lies at an awkward angle as if a child dropped it and has forgotten all about it – the only difference is that this rabbit is a thousand times bigger than a child’s toy and has knitted organs spilling out from its side.
From the installation project page:
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 pinkwoolen 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 inlove you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, overwoolen 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.
Gelitin installed the knitted sculpture in 2005 with the hope that it will slowly decay until 2025. I’d love to know if the giant bunny is still intact so if you’ve visited it recently let me know.
Gelitin Collective
Gelitin (formerly known as Gelatin) is comprised of four artists;
Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban and Wolfgang Gantner. The group met in 1978 and began exhibiting together in 1993. The collective creates art events involving installation and performance often combined with humour and scatological references.
Their works include a roller coaster inside a gallery in Milan, a boating pond on the roof of the Hayward Gallery in London and a hidden underwater cave, only accessible by diving through a pipe 5 meters deep, as part of the Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany.
Many of the group’s works invite audience members to participate in the creation or destruction of the work, an act that questions the traditional relationship between an artwork and its spectator.
The following publications include the works of Gelitin and can be purchased via Amazon. These are affiliate links, meaning that if you make a purchase on my recommendation, a small percentage of the sale will go to The Fiber Studio.
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