granny installation

"knitted by dozens of grannies out of pink wool".

The 200-foot-long toy rabbit lies on the side of the 5,000 foot high Colletto Fava mountain in northern Italy's Piedmont region.

Viennese art group Gelatin designed the giant soft toy and say it was "knitted by dozens of grannies out of pink wool".

Group member Wolfgang Gantner said: "It's supposed to make you feel small, like Gulliver. You walk around it and you can't help but smile."

And Gelatin members say the bunny is not just for walking around - they are expecting hikers to climb its 20 foot sides and relax on its belly.

The giant rabbit is expected to remain on the mountain side until 2025.
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It lies abandoned on a mountainside in Piedmont, northern Italy, as if dropped there by a gargantuan careless child: a 200ft-long woolly rabbit, toilet-paper pink and stuffed with straw.

In order to create their massive sculpture, the four artists who make up the Gelatin collective in Vienna used 1,000kg of wool. It took more than a year to knit the shape and another seven weeks to manoeuvre it into place and stuff it.

"It just came into our minds years ago, the idea of a huge rabbit falling from the sky," says Gelatin group member Wolfgang Gantner. "Then, we had the idea of having it lying in nature." The artists want visitors to scale the bunny's flanks, where a wound spills its fluffy heart and intestines on to the ground. They plan to leave it on the hillside to quietly rot for at least 20 years. "There are already animals living inside - mice, snails and snakes, and even more bacteria," says Gantner.

Hase has already caused controversy locally. "There are some mountaineers who hate it," Gantner admits. "But to me it's a very silent work. Quite poetic."

· Hase can be found on the side of Colletto Fava, above the village of Artesina, Piedmont, Italy.
guardian

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