Interview with Henriikka Himma
We interviewed Henriikka Himma, the dramaturg and convener of the site-specific performance Sakraaliesseet. Sakraaliesseet will be performed in Alppila Church on 20.-23.8.2025.
Photo: by JIRINA
Mad House: Sakraaliesseet is a site-specific performance in the Alppila Church. The building will soon be removed from active parish use due to structural issues (or low usage), like many other mid-century churches. You've mentioned that your work explores urban space and how architecture can take part in performance. What is special about the Alppila Church, and how does it participate in the writing of the performance and become part of your art work?
Henriikka Himma: I'll start by answering from the perspective of architecture. We will look at the Alppila Church as an example of modern church architecture. By that we mean church buildings built from the post-war period up to the 1970s. Modern church architecture reflects their function not only as churches but also as places where communities come together. In the context of this performance, one of the key functions of modern church buildings was to blur the distinction between the everyday and the sacred.
Our performance is a site-specific, and the space of the Alppila Church participate in our performance as the strongest, supporting element, against which the other elements of the performance act. We aim to explore the different spaces of the church and explore, among other things, what kinds of spectator relations, materialities and performers' work they suggest. Overall, the juxtaposition of the permanence of the architecture and the temporary of performance creates a large part of the tension of the performance.
The Alppila Church represents modern work centre architecture and its design principles included creating everyday meeting places for the working class of Alppila. Its construction was seen by some as regrettable part of the church's secularization process. When churches have lost their members for various reasons, money decreases and these young but renovation-aged churches have been closed instead of being renovated - modernist buildings do not yet have a very strong conservation value in our time. Through this performance, we ask the question: what happens when a building that suggests a connection between the sacred and the everyday disappears from the urban landscape? Where can we find rituals and spaces for comfort in our everyday lives? The Evangelical Lutheran Church is not a place that is equally open to everyone; ugly and exclusionary things happen inside it alongside charity, and we don't need more buildings that uphold such values. Instead, our urban space needs places where we can collectively explore and create rituals to be in touch with the big existential questions that affect us all. Perhaps our performance can be seen as a kind of foyer to such a space.
The essay I have written, which we are adapting into a performance with the working group, explores what it might mean to create a site-specific stage essay. Like a play, it suggests a certain aesthetic and rhythm, a spatial relationship and, lightly, a stage relationship. In the process of writing it, I have observed and studied the Alppila Church, the congregation and the process of relinquishing the church. Aöö of this has become intertwined with my own, a bit selective, personal history the church, and all of this has become part of my personal history with church buildings. I navigate this history in the text through with an autobiographical yet essayistic approach.
MH: What do sacred spaces mean in contemporary architecture, as urban space is increasingly divided into private and commercial spaces? The sacredness has often become privatized and experienced in private, and its definitions are vast and diverse. The Urban environment also reflects multiculturalism and religious diversity. How does your work engage with Christianity and the institution of the church? Or with the sacred more broadly?
HH: An Evangelical Lutheran church building carries a massive amount of collective knowledge, choreography, interpreted histories, current political conflicts, contradictions, private and personal stories, heavy building materials and a relationship to the surrounding urban space. Among other things. We try to dwell with them but we can't have a relationship with everything in one work. Defining teh focus has been a major question in our process – so that we don't become exhausted while making the performance.
Our understanding of sacred has clarified around the experience of being present with time passing and with death – around the search for a place where we can be together with others, contemplating the big questions, perhaps grieving, or simply feeling the presence of something greater than ourselves. My own writing process has been influenced by a sudden personal loss and I've been wandering through urban spaces carrying heavy feelings... I do not belong to any religious community, and I'v found myself longing for rituals and a sense of community to help hold and process existential questions of impermanence. Wondering where I could go to cry. Church buildings have often brought me comfort. But entering the... Well, the sacred is a rather ambivalent concept, and it seems to disappear from the places that have been dedicated to it and emerge in places where it's not expected. Even though the spacious church architecture can evoke the same sense of awe as powerful artistic experience, I often find myself looking at everything that wasn't meant to be looked at – unintended details – which are really interesting, even humorous, in the midst of the building's stern, elevated minimalism and, at times, fantastical elements.
MH: The performance is based on the essay work Sakraaliesseet. How does essayism function as the basis for this performance?
HH: The Sakraaliesseet is a two-part work: an essay to be published as a Poesiavihko and then a performance. As I mentioned earlier, the subtitle of the published text is a site-specific stage essay. Although I use and explore the term, a stage essay, it is – as we've discovered through our rehearsal process – a rather boundless or limitless form. If the text to be adapted is an essay, the big question is whether the essayistic gesture is adapted and if so, what elements of performance does it concern? OR do we express and perform the text in its essay-like quality and what role does the church space play in relation to it? We came to rehearsals when the writing process of the text was still in progress, so now we are exploring staging it. The text is very much present in the structure of the performance, but we don't yet know all the hierarchies and "rules" of our performance. One way our choreographer and another performer, Pie Kär, has described the stage essay is that it extends or comments on the idea of the text through other performative means. We still don't know whether the text ill act as kind of monument amidst everything flowing around it – or how it will blend into the rest of the performance. What remains as text, what becomes expressed through another performance medium? What has been essential for me in the essay form is to be openly influenced and to think together or to continue thinking or opposing it with other works of art, thinkers and books. Open intertextuality and the presence of the writing/thinking process. This intertextuality and the idea of recycling has been present in all aspects of the process of making the performance.
