A Record Store Designed for Mice in Sweden, Featuring Albums by Mouse Davis, Destiny’s Cheese, Dolly Parsley & More

We live in [insert adjec­tive, exple­tive, emo­ji, tweet, Tik Tok video here] times, I don’t have to tell you. We could all do with a lit­tle dis­trac­tion from cur­rent events. I’m talk­ing, obvi­ous­ly, about mice.

Not every­one loves the lit­tle home invaders. Some peo­ple loathe them. But who could fail to be charmed by the cre­ations of the Anony­Mouse col­lec­tive, a group of artists who have recre­at­ed “minia­ture restau­rants, record shops, and apothe­caries squeeze[d] into ground-lev­el win­dows on the street next to their human-sized equiv­a­lents”?

These instal­la­tions have appeared “in cities across Swe­den, France, and the Isle of Man,” writes Grace Ebert at Colos­sal, and they are pro­found­ly adorable. The artists sug­gest “that the mice have a sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship with the pedes­tri­ans on the street” by repur­pos­ing human items like a cham­pagne top­per or match­box as mouse-sized fur­ni­ture.

“Twen­ty-five install­ments cur­rent­ly exist across Europe…largely inspired by Astrid Lind­gren’s and Beat­rix Pot­ter’s whim­si­cal tales and movies from Don Bluth and Dis­ney.” Unlike pre­vi­ous, sim­i­lar projects by the artists Bill Scan­ga and, more recent­ly, Fil­ip­po and Mar­i­an­na, the minia­tures do not fea­ture any actu­al rodents, alive or oth­er­wise, oth­er than those who chance to wan­der in off the street. Instead, they adapt human cul­tur­al prod­ucts for an imag­ined par­al­lel mouse world.

AnonyMouse’s lat­est instal­la­tion, Ricot­ta Records in Lund, Swe­den, “fea­tures tiny vinyl,” for exam­ple, “from the likes of Destiny’s Cheese, Bruce Spen­wood, Kesel­la Fitzger­ald, Dol­ly Pars­ley, and Win­nimere Hous­ton,” reports the Vinyl Fac­to­ry. “In addi­tion to its record selec­tion, the shop also has a selec­tion of minia­ture posters and instru­ments.”

See sev­er­al images of the inven­tive inte­ri­or above and below, and more—including band posters for Rats Against the Machine and Mod­est Mouse, the only band whose name remains unchanged—at the Vinyl Fac­to­ry and the Anony­mouse Insta­gram page. Should you be so moved as to par­tic­i­pate in the grow­ing Anony­Mouse fan com­mu­ni­ty, they have start­ed a con­test for the best Ricot­ta Records sug­ges­tions. The win­ner will receive a framed, mouse-sized poster.

You don’t have to love mice to get in on the action. Cur­rent fron­trun­ners, NME notes, include “Amy Winemouse” and “Tai­lor Swiss”….

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Art Gallery for Ger­bils: Two Quar­an­tined Lon­don­ers Cre­ate a Mini Muse­um Com­plete with Ger­bil-Themed Art

Two Cats Keep Try­ing to Get Into a Japan­ese Art Muse­um … and Keep Get­ting Turned Away: Meet the Thwart­ed Felines, Ken-chan and Go-chan

Enter the Cov­er Art Archive: A Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of 800,000 Album Cov­ers from the 1950s through 2018

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness