ABOVE: aerial detail of Hase (Rabbit), a 200-foot long rabbit doll that will occupy an Italian mountainside for the next 20 years.

Last Sunday the Viennese artists’ collective Gelatin unveiled their latest work to the public: a gigantic rabbit-shaped doll on a mountainside 1600 m above the Italian village of Artesina. Made of some sort of fabric stuffed with straw, the pink bunny is 200 feet long and 20 feet high, sprawled across the mountainside, where it is to stay for the next 20 years. Gelatin says that the rabbit is sturdy enough to climb, and they fully expect hikers to scale its huge pink torso and relax, have a picnic, whatever.

The scale and ambition of this is just too hilariously grandiose, it’s like a piece of land art with a plush pop-art twist. Gelatin’s website provides an amusing, if somewhat abstruse, statement of intent:

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.

No matter, how could you not want to make the pilgrimage?

LINK: Ananova > Artists erect giant pink bunny on mountain [via Sploid]