“Steller’s sea cow, Stellers sjöko, Hydrodamalis gigas: The first animal to force humankind to take a hard look at itself.”

In an exhibition hall at the Natural History Museum in Helsinki stands the skeleton of a Steller’s sea cow. Its journey there has spanned centuries and crossed the globe. The history of these bones holds a series of moments entwined with the histories of both imperialism and the modern conservation movement.

Through the story of an expedition, Elolliset takes the audience back to the birth of the concept of extinction. The production reveals how Western humankind came to grasp the devastating truth that, if we choose, we can erase both individual creatures and entire species from the book of life.

Through museum display cases assembled and dismantled on stage, a vista opens onto the past, where the first ripples of the sixth mass extinction are beginning to break upon a distant shore. Elolliset considers this without apportioning blame, yet without evading responsibility.

With humour and wistfulness, it examines humankind’s faith in its own intelligence and its feverish pursuit of truth. The production prompts us to ask: which ideas does our own age regard as unquestionably certain and natural, only for future generations to prove them wrong?

Iida Turpeinen’s novel Elolliset is the most successful Finnish debut novel of all time. Published in 2023, it won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for a Debut Work, was nominated for the Finlandia Prize, appeared on the New York Times list of recommended historical fiction, and its translation rights have currently been sold in nearly 30 language regions.

The novel has been adapted for the stage by Pipsa Lonka, with the WAUHAUS collective responsible for the production’s artistic design. WAUHAUS is an award-winning multidisciplinary collective based in Helsinki, renowned for its immersive audiovisual stage aesthetic and collaborative approaches to artistic creation.

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