The garden of the vainglorious rabbit

Authors’ Comment

THE GARDEN OF THE VAINGLORIOUS RABBIT

In a veduta of Timisoara dating from the year 1625 made by a surveyor and minor painter Paulus Fürst appears, in the foreground an ironic scene, which today we could call surreal: three elegantly dressed men discuss pointing to the extreme left of the format where a rabbit looks at his image reflected in a mirror. This scene takes place on a high place above the city, which is shown in the distance.

The title of this representation,

„FATIS AGITATUS INIQUIS” - „Excited by fate and unjust”

as well as the bilingual text associated with it

„Omnibus imponis, quemvis traducis, et omneis
Derides, forsan, tu nisi, nemo sapit”
„You impose on everyone, you expose everyone and you make fun of everyone, Probably believing that no one understands”

continues the satirical style of the scene.

Like the topographer in Kafka's Castle, the haughty rabbit depicted in the veduta is the consciousness of the city, which shouts from outside it, mirroring itself in the icon of the fortress. Although eminently interior, a consciousness is deaf from the center to the borders, but often, at dawn, it walks outside to look at the profile of the fortress, its precious cutout on the horizon. Today's city no longer has a profile, nor an exterior. His legitimacy slowly recovers in isolated consciousness. The rabbit, the topographer called to the castle, the veduta painter all wandering through the interior of the city, constantly looking for the condition of the horizon, the high place of view, the azimuth. Today's city no longer claims its veduta, idealization, scaenographia.
The Micronation is an quarrel with the world, a scream, a rupture, a radicalization of a partial truth, which obscures the current reality. As an act of abstraction under a hermetically produced identity, the micronation is a world at odds with the world, a city under siege. Co-present with the mundane reality, it is timed distinctly, in urgency or in slowness. Its time enters the delight of the capricious garden that gathers in its diaphanous rudiments, schemes, obsolete devices. Its geography is drawn in the sense of the collection or inventory of artifacts.