A peek at the autumn 2025 programme!

Henriikka Himma & working group: Sakraaliesseet Photo by Saana Volanen

Mad House Helsinki's autumn 2025 program opens with Henriikka Himma and wowking group's site-specific performance Sakraalitesseet, which will take place in Alppila Church on 20-24 August 2025.The artwork asks where we can gather together to reflect on the joys and sorrows of life, as well as its existential and cosmic questions, as part of everyday experience. The Alppila Church is also the site for the performance and an example of a broader phenomenon where many modern churches built between 1960s and 1990s are being demolished or closed due to low use and structural problems.
Sakraaliesseet is part of the 20th anniversary program of the Runokuu Festival, and is a co-production of the Live Art Society, Mad House Helsinki and the Nuoren Voiman Liitto. 

In the beginning of October, the Mad House stage will host a performance installation, an immersive zine on stage by Iida Hägglund, Helka Saariniemi, Jenni Räsäsen, Vilma Vantola & Eeva-Maaria Halonen. The work opens a passage to five experiences that are rooted in girlhood in one way or another. tyttörakkauszine is an attempt to descripe, perform, love and write oneself and on's girlhood, both present and the already forgotten.  It is a hauntological, breathtaking, dramatic, but lounging, naïvist, melancholic yet silly sad girl. The sad girl's sorrow 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 premiere at the Mad House's stage. The performance is a memorial of the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students in Iguala, Mexico, on the 11th anniversary. Ashes and Seeds asks how a spesific event has survived and changed in our memories, throughout 11 years of deceit. The performance doesn't intend to provide new information, but rather be a place for collective naming, threading and recalling accountability. 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 dearly, fiercely. We engrave them in our memory. The sound designer of the performance is  Alejandro Montes de Oca.

There will be more additions to the Autumn 2025 program - stay tuned!