“Steller’s sea cow, Stellers sjöko, Hydrodamalis gigas: The first animal that forced humanity to take a look at itself.”

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

Elolliset takes the audience on an expedition to the origins of the concept of extinction. The production reveals how Western humanity awoke to the devastating realisation that, if we choose, we can erase both individual living beings and entire species from the book of life.

Through museum display cases assembled and dismantled on stage, a view into the past unfolds before us, to a distant shore where the first ripples of the sixth mass extinction are beginning to break. Elolliset looks at this without assigning blame, but without evading responsibility.

With humour and wistfulness, it examines humanity’s faith in its own intellect and its feverish pursuit of the right knowledge. The production prompts us to ask: which ideas does our own age consider 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 the best debut novel, was nominated for the Finlandia Prize, appeared on The New York Times’s recommended reading list for historical fiction, and its translation rights have now been sold in nearly 30 language territories.

The novel has been adapted for the stage by Pipsa Lonka, with the production’s artistic design created by the WAUHAUS collective. Based in Helsinki, WAUHAUS is an award-winning multidisciplinary collective known for its immersive audiovisual stage aesthetic and collaborative models of authorship.

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