A peek at the autumn 2025 programme!
Henriikka Himma & team: Sacral essays Photo by Saana Volanen
Mad House Helsinki's autumn 2025 programme opens with Henriikka Himma and her team's site-specific performance Sacral essays, which will take place in Alppila Church on 20-24 August 2025.The work explores where we can gather together to address existential, joy and sorrow and cosmic questions of life as part of everyday life. The Alppila Church is the setting for the work and an example of a wider phenomenon where many modern churches built in the 1960s and 1990s are being demolished or closed due to low use and structural problems.
Sacral Essays is part of the 20th anniversary programme of the Poetry Month Festival, and is a co-production of the Performing Arts Society, Mad House Helsinki and the Young Power Union.
At the beginning of October, the Mad House stage will host a performance installation, an immersive and theatrical zine by Iida Hägglund, Helka Saariniemi, Jenni Räsäsen, Vilma Vantola & Eeva-Maaria Halonen. The work opens access to five experiences that are permeated by girlhood in one way or another. tyttörakkauszine is an attempt to write and portray both present and forgotten girlhood - hauntological, breathtaking, dramatic, yet floundering, naïve, melancholic and silly sad girl. The sad girl's grief is a resistance to a society that is often fixated on the idea of presenting girlhood as joyful and fun.
At the end of October, the installation Ashes and Seeds: a commemorative performance by visual and performance artist Diana Soria Hernandez will be shown. The performance will commemorate the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students in Iguala, Mexico, on the 11th anniversary of the event. Ashes and Seeds asks how a particular event has been preserved and transformed in our memories during 11 years of betrayal. The presentation is not intended to offer new information, but to serve as a space for collective naming, connecting and remembering responsibility. What happens in one place is never an isolated event. We fight for the truths we still remember - we pass them on and hold on to them firmly, fiercely. We engrave them on our memories. Alejandro Montes de Oca is responsible for the sound design.
There will be more additions to the Autumn 2025 programme - stay tuned!
