1992, Magasin, Centre National
d'Art Contemporain
Grenoble, France

Haha inflated a store-bought blimp with a mixture of helium and air, and smeared its surface with oily red (French) lipstick. Lead weights hanging from the blimp's belly kept it floating at convenient kissing height. Although Haha was given one room to place the work, like all the other artists in the exhibition, Nana moved freely with whimsical air currents, wandering outside the space allotted, kissing walls and people and leaving affectionate red splotches.

The curatorial school at Magasin invited Haha to create a piece for a show called "Between a Dog and a Wolf." The iron building, a former warehouse that had been transformed into a contemporary art center, was the size of an airport hangar. It had been made by the Gustave Eiffel workshops at the end of the 19th century during an age of spectacular international exhibitions and ambitious engineering feats, including the invention and popularization of dirigibles. Ignoring the enormous scale of this unusual structure, the designers of the art center placed a shoebox-like rectangle within the space, and broke it up into smaller cubicles in which to house the art. The overall effect looked like a trailer in the astrodome.

Haha's initial plan to float a dirigible in the giant and empty airspace above the claustrophobic cubicles, casting shadows below, was curatorially defeated, seemingly because it gave the group a superior position to that of the other invited artists. Haha decided to lower the blimp into its hangar for maximum interaction.