Mapping of Initiatives on Culture, Health and Well-being

The Solidarity Stages project is an invitation for artists ( musicians, bands, orchestras, choirs, everyone singing) to give a little of their time and share their talent with ill and isolated people. In partnership of the offered scene, the artists commit themselves to give an intervention in a hospital. Each band or musical group programmed gives a second performance to sick people in health establishments that cannot travel. This principle makes it possible to propose to the healthcare settings a multidisciplinary programming of quality in a social and united dynamics. The project is a initiative of Culture&Hospital Association created in 2003, with a federative social project attentive to any person in need of care, support and social ties. They bring culture as a unique resource for improving the health and quality of life of people with neuro-evolutionary diseases and depressive disorders as well as to their caregivers. It favors self-expression and reconstruction while being a powerful social bonding enhancer.

10th Gate is a cultural space open to all in the Rouen University Hospital. With a program of about three exhibitions per year, this space aims to offer singular views of artists in connection with hospital themes. At the interface between the city and the hospital, patients and their families, professionals, students and residents are invited to come and satisfy their curiosity and to immerse themselves in artistic techniques and universes that regularly question our relationship with beings, things and practices. At the junction between the city and the hospital, between inside and outside, the Gate space reminds us that it is a place of passage between two states of body and mind, between two worlds, whether concrete or abstract, between the known and the unknown.

The project was developed jointly by the maternity and the cultural department of Rouen University Hospital in the area of the Women, Mother and Child Pavilion. This cultural initiative responds to the request that was made to improve the space of the maternity with an artistic proposal, in order to give it its own identity and to promote exchanges. This project goes beyond a decorative purpose, being part of a more global approach linked to parenthood and in particular to father-child relations. Fathers want to be more and more present in the maternity process. The maternity hospital of Rouen University Hospital, for its part, offers more spaces where their presence is encouraged (in particular preparation courses, ultrasounds, presence during childbirth).
One of the objectives of the cultural policy of the Rouen University Hospital is to support the overall care of the hospitalized person, but also to bring a prospective dimension to the medical and nursing project. Inspired by the specific context of the hospital by integrating in particular the constraints of the care units, the intervention of an artist bears the foundations of a sensitive and aesthetic experience. The “Fathers” photographic exhibition developed in conjunction with the maternity teams responds to the request to invest the maternity consultation space with an artistic proposal. The residency of photographer Grégoire Korganow in the maternity hospital aims to offer, in images, an original look at fathers in spaces that have long kept them away. The residency was keen to question the intimate and essential relationship that is forged in the immediacy of the birth of a child.

The writing workshops are part of the services from the Health-Arts Research Center department of the Preventive Health Center. The workshops combining were created in order to work on emotions, feelings, while cultivating and expressing oneself, in a framework conducive to health prevention. Artists are involved for each workshop to create emotions for a spectator-patient, and offer him a unique relationship and to question the quality of the human relationship within a health practice. Culture guarantees the health of future generations, since health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease. As artists, they create emotions, but not for the purpose of analyzing. This project is part of a long time research initiative.

The project is an artistic and cultural action on the scale of the territory to collect the words of people suffering from Alzheimer's disease in the residential facilities for dependent elderly people (EHPADs) of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region willing to get involved in this process. The words of people with Alzheimer's disease are often ignored or considered incomprehensible or even senseless. However, these words and phrases often carry meaning for those who know how to listen to them in light of the history of the person who utters them.
Facing this observation, and strengthened by the experience of "Ça s'arrête à quel âge?" (It stops at what age?), Michel Laforcade, Director General of the New Aquitaine Regional Health Agency, wished in 2016 to set up an artistic action to collect the words of people suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
This project has the social ambition to question the way we collectively pay attention to the difference. Thus, through theater and video, "Je ne voudrais pas déranger" leads us to take a step aside from our perceptions, our habits and our attitudes towards Alzheimer's disease. Thanks to the shift brought about by the language of theater, thanks to the translation of a supposedly senseless material into an artistic statement, the public collectively discover the poetry of these words, reexamine their image of this disease and that of the people who suffer from it. In this way, the public empathizes with the people suffering for Alzheimer's disease. The author Renaud Borderie was commissioned to write a dramaturgical text based on all these words, a collection of words from more than 120 EHPADs institutions in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. Once this text was written, three companies were commissioned to produce a production based on it. After a joint residency at the Molière-Scène d'Aquitaine, the performances were presented in the territories of New Aquitaine. The piloting of the project was carried out by the Culture and Health department in New Aquitaine and OARA and ended on June 30, 2019.

The Invitation to Beauty Association aims to promote health through beauty in all its expressions and beauty for health in a preventive and cathartic function in the health, social, sports, economic and cultural field. They aim to to this in collaboration with the nursing staff, patients, social, economic and cultural actors. The objectives are achieved for the benefit of patients and all persons in need of care at any age and in any environment. The art and poetry library project is located in the Mother and Child Hospital, in the pediatric uro-visceral department of Professor Pierre-Yves Mure. The "artistic and poetic prescriptions" that were initiated, hung at the end of the patients bed and give birth to sublime stories to be told to their relatives and caregivers.

Art, body, science got born as the artistic residency of Leonardo Montecchia at the University of Montpellier, in 2015. He created and facilitated these workshops to explore the question of movement. This specific theme is questioned through various exercises of body practice and directed by artists and researchers.
In 2022, one day of Art, body and science was dedicated to the body, to movement and to artistic and scientific exploration of the issue of health. Here, movement is used as a conduit for knowledge: the body becomes a space for experimentation, experience and reflection on the following questions: is movement a tool for healing or well-being?; does physical activity reduce fatigue?; mobile or immobile sickness: what difference(s)?

Artists' Health Week is happening each October and is was created by the Prevention Artists's Health Association. The principle consists in a week of events in France or abroad in order to talk about the health problems that may be encountered by amateur or professional artists in the context of their activity. The events take place directly in cultural structures, with artists and officials, but also in health structures in order to give future professionals as much information as possible on the pathologies linked to artistic activities. Also, APSArts put artists in touch with therapists who know the pathologies linked to artistic activities.

The project Musiques Brutes et Handicap has the objective to give the opportunity for a group of teenagers with autism spectrum disorders to experiment with music under real conditions of artistic creation. The young people from the Institut Médico-Professionnel Le Roitelet in Tourcoing are working with Franq De Quengo, musician and founder of the raw music festival Sonic Protest, and Thomas Masson, educator, in a musical residency that allows them to experiment with music, sounds and arts in a process of discovery and creation. The participants are involved in workshops and explorations to lead them towards a sensory and intuitive music practice. Using recycled objects, the young artists invent hybrid instruments, in particular by using wild instruments, accompanied by Julien Bancilhon and Benoit Poulain, musicians and luthiers, then, at their own pace and according to their desires, the young people compose songs that they have recorded by revisiting their favorite titles or by composing them.

AGAP for Art & Game aims to to put in place recommendations on the use of art and board games for prevention and treatment of cognitive diseases among seniors. AGAP was developed in 3 stages:
- A first survey (January 2021) with a group of of experts
- A second survey (February - March 2021) for experts but also for users based on the answers and question from the first step.
- A meeting of experts with a conference and an exhibition in June 2021