Landsberg - He looks at the parking lot. And what he sees there fills him with deep skepticism. Concrete desert where it was once built. And tin mobiles that literally attack him. Since last week, the two artists Anka Helfertová and Leonard Mandl have given their brown hares a new home at the Penzinger Feld on the green strip between the butcher's shop and the parking lot as part of the Landsberg cultural summer (even if it is now winter). The first visitors were amazed at the opening in front of the mound of earth. And asked themselves: "What is the rabbit doing in the parking lot?"
The bronze figure, looking slightly down at the viewer from above, sits on a heaped up, bare mound of earth. He's still naked. In spring, when the frost does not move too close to the scattered seeds thanks to the landscapers, grass and flowers should sprout out of the ground: typical for the environment, insect and rabbit-friendly. Because for Helfertová and Mandl, “culture and nature are interwoven”, as the 28-year-old Mandl, who was born and raised in Landsberg, said at the opening ceremony. Whereby the words “slightly bizarre” must be added to the “solemn”: As in the case of large sculptural revelations of important personalities, the Hoppler, portrayed in a sitting position with twisted head posture, is wrapped under a chamois-colored silk scarf with red-pink flowers around him. Katharina Bach,otherwise acting at the Münchner Kammerspiele, the hare's first glimpses into the distance accompanied by a melody on the trumpet. And speeches are made to clarify the crucial question: "What is the rabbit doing in the parking lot?"
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Anka Helfertová and Leonard Mandl with their rabbit
© ks
The two artists want to subtly draw attention to the need to rethink our approach to the environment and nature.
“Subtle”, emphasizes Mandl - with the clearly visible popular figure “Hase” between the butcher's shop and the sheet metal avalanche.
The place is a "non-place", not a city, not a field;
a place that could be like this anywhere, a place that "opens up rationally" during the day: drive up by car and buy everything you need - or not need.
At night the parking lot becomes empty, people dwindle - and the animals come, Helvertová Mandl's picture continues.
At least the grass on the green strip is not treated with pesticides like the surrounding fields, the Prague-born 31-year-old is convinced.
She likes animals - and, as the sculptor responsible for the animal, knows the properties of her study object: up to 70 km / h, with rapid acceleration, for humans usually only a small brown-white point - and yet the inferior in the fight against that Automobile.
Inanimate plush
At the beginning of the 20th century, animals were still firmly anchored in everyday life.
“Now they are wandering into the imagination”, Helvertová knows: as plush toys, as characters in animated films with human characteristics - boiling rats or animals from the Ice Age that make us laugh.
If they are actually present, we will make them our house friends.
Or they are behind bars: in zoos, where humans try to 'lift' the species that are becoming extinct.
The brown hare on the hill at Penzinger Feld obviously knows where this is going - for him and for us.
Otherwise his gaze might not be so knowingly resigned.
