“Steller’s sea cow, Stellers sjöko, Hydrodamalis gigas: The first animal that forced man to look at himself.”

In Helsinki, in the exhibition hall of the Natural History Museum, stands the skeleton of a Steller’s sea cow. The journey there has gone through the centuries and across the globe. The history of these bones has accumulated a series of moments that are intertwined with the history of both imperialism and the modern idea of nature conservation.

The Living Ones takes the viewer through an expedition to the birth of the concept of extinction. The performance depicts how Western people realised the overwhelming fact that we can, if we want to, erase both individual living things and entire species from the books of the living.

Through the showcases of the museum, which is being built and dismantled on stage, a view into the past opens up before us, where the first ripples of the sixth wave of extinction begin to hit the distant shore. Elolliset watches the events of the sixth extinction wave without blame, but without escaping responsibility.

It looks with a funny and wistful gaze at a person who trusts his own intellect and the feverish search for the right information. The presentation makes us ask, what are the notions which our time considers absolutely certain and natural, but which future ages will prove to be false?

Iida Turpeinen’s novel Elolliset is the most successful Finnish debut novel of all time. The book was published in 2023 and won the Helsingin Sanomat Debut Book Award, was nominated for the Finlandia Prize, made it to the New York Times’ list of recommended readings for historical fiction, and its translation rights have currently been sold to almost 30 language areas.

The novel has been dramatised for the stage by Pipsa Lonka , and the work is artistically designed by the WAUHAUS collective. WAUHAUS is an award-winning multidisciplinary collective based in Helsinki, known for its comprehensive audiovisual stage aesthetics and shared authorship operating models.