In “Bunny Project” I use the rabbit as symbol for subversive activities, activities outside the reach of the control system. The rabbit has an almost unmatched ability to reproduce and spread uncontrollably and given the right conditions it can be almost impossible to stop.  At exhibitions in Galleri 54 and Röda Sten in Göteborg 2004, I used the rabbit analogy to once more return to the issues of uncontrolled distribution of copyrighted material, pirating and downloading. For the project I made an extensive research work where I examined the concept of the rabbit from several angles. I studied the idea of the rabbit in an historical context as well as the symbolic use of rabbits in myth, art history and popular culture. I used some fragments of this material to put together a text, which came to be used in several exhibitions. The text is not scientific even though parts of it are pure fact. Mixed with the factual parts are personal episodes from my life, which makes the end product into something else. During my research I found to my surprise that the northernmost natural population of European wild rabbit was not far from my home in Göteborg, I decided to try to track the rabbits down. When I finally discovered traces and rabbit holes on a golf-course on Hisingen I put out a hefty amount of carrots for the animals to feast on. This act might well be considered the very heart of the project. Putting out carrots on golf-courses is quite obviously a symbolic gesture. It’s an encouragement for the rabbits to continue their underground networking, digging tunnels that undermine the hierarchies. Golf of course being symbolically synonym with upper class entertainment, and thereby representing oppression. The golf-course is basically nature made obedient and impotent.  Nature tamed and made to entertain. There are always places for golf-courses. May it be sensitive nature or just areas of common public interest, propositions to lay out golf-courses in these places always seem to get favourable reception from the responsible politicians (of whom a suspicious amount always seem to be golf players themselves). The rabbit has a double nature, and this has been a great advantage in my project. The rabbit is so to speak a cute virus. It has a very harmless appearance, but beneath this cuddly surface lays potential disaster, something for example British land owners in Australia during the nineteenth century got to know, when they introduced the animal on their grounds for hunting purposes. A handful of specimens reproduced themselves into a land wide pest within a couple of years. When I presented the golf-course action on the Stockholm Art Fair 2005 I did so with an installation that not only featured photographic documentation of the action, but also a 300 kilo pile of carrots, ensuring my piece to be the most photographed work on the fair. More recently I’ve been working with a series of bombs constructed of carrots. Obviously harmless, but still mimicking the equipment of terrorists, they keep the double nature of the rabbit even though the encouragement now has become the actual threat, and the rabbits are nowhere to be seen. The latest version of these bombs was made as an installation at the big underground square beneath amongst other the Sony Center and the Daimler Chrysler building at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. I placed carrot bombs on all the supporting pillars, potentially undermining the whole economical centre of Berlin.

 

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Conny Blom