Visitors to the Swedish city of Lund should keep an eye out for an adorable record store for little rodents, but please note that you will have to cast your eyes downwards to spot it.
The new installation is the work of AnonyMouse, a collective that originated in Malmö. They started building miniature installations for mice in 2016, inspired by the stories of Astrid Lindgren and Beatrix Potter and the movies of Walt Disney and Don Bluth.
They've made over 25 scenes so far in four different cities in Sweden, as well as in the south of France and on the Isle of Man. There is also an interactive mystery quest involving newspapers, emails, maps and answering machines.
"We think that at some point most kids like to imagine that there is a world parallel to ours, where small animals live quite like we do but recycle things that we have lost," AnonyMouse tells Lonely Planet. "So we try to incorporate as many human objects as we can - a champagne cork becomes a chair, a matchbox a desk, a seashell becomes a lampshade and a stamp becomes a painting. When we started, it took us three months to complete a scene, but now that we've gotten the hang of it, it's considerably faster."
All of the collective's work is installed in the middle of the night, and they never reveal the precise locations of the installations. Fans of their work enjoy searching for clues to their whereabouts in the photos, by analyzing the bricks and surroundings. The new record store follows the opening of the ‘Cicada Pharmacy’ on another street in the city in July, and it contains miniature mice-themed records and posters.
"Our main drive is to bring a little bit of everyday magic to children and pedestrians passing by, and hopefully inspire some to change their own street for the better," says AnonyMouse. "We believe that part of the allure of the installations is that they could have been built by anyone, and also that the focus remains on the scenes and not the creators."
Follow AnonyMouse on Instgram here.
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