Missions

HAO is a NGO created to organize cultural & artistic events questioning the links between art & society, to allow the promotion of contemporary art and specially the visibility of young European artists and eventually to participate to the European networking dynamics through partnerships and collaborations.
HAO wishes then to encourage the European ‘micro-construction’ through interpersonal relationships between young Europeans, professionals working in the cultural field and the artists eager to build a Europe of Culture based on a European identity.

To achieve its aims, HAO will set up projects such as exhibitions, professional meetings & symposiums, workshops, artistic residencies, etc.


Name  
   
HAO is an acronym for “Hospitalisation Artistique d’Office”, which is a reference to the Hospitalisation psychiatrique d’office put in the cultural field.

The automatic psychiatric hospitalization is a legal measure decided by the chief administrator advised by a doctor that enables them to put against his will a mentally insane person who is disturbing the public order and who is considered as dangerous for the society or for himself in a hospital. This measure is both medical and dealing with the security of the state. The decision is taken to protect not only the mad one but also the people and even the entire society.
Then, the automatic psychiatric hospitalization raises some questions about how a society defines madness, danger, normality and accepted behaviors and how the society creates tools to protect itself.

HAO thinks that there are others ways a society can develop to protect itself and its components (the individuals). HAO thinks that art is a relevant way to wonder about limits and to allow people to question their own limits and their society’s ones and to enable their mental and spiritual achievement.  

Then, HAO proposes to lock you, just for a while, in its own conceptions of art, to lock you up to force you to see and to think about these notions of difference, normality, identity, illness, danger, order, art, society, etc.
We hope you’ll enjoy!  


The team

Céline SETTIMELLI
Marion GUILLOT
Yannick RAMA
Laure SIMIAN

e-mail :

Contributors:
Logo BB/BI : Vassili Kouznetsov
Logo HAO: Julien Lagarde
Website conception : Lionel Villard , Céline Settimelli & Laure Simian