Co-production with Själö Workgroup.

Själö Herbarium is the third instalment of the Själö Poiesis anthologye by Lotta Petronella. Initiated in 2016, her documentary film Själö – Island of Souls premiered in 2020 at CPH:DOX. The second instalment took the form of a radio essay; Själö– A Place And A Mental Space aired on YLE later the same year.

Set to premiere in May 2025, Själö Herbarium is a performance, lecture and choral adaption created for the stage. The final chapter in Lotta’s expanded body of work on the island of Seili in the Turku archipelago, Själö Herbarium focuses on the island’s history as a hospital, the dawn of the various institutions present today and how to read Seili as a part of Europe and the West’s institutional history during the 17th and 18th centuries. The island’s first hospital was established as a detention centre to isolate Lepers, the poor, war veterans and the blind. Later, it became a psychiatric hospital and was finally transformed into a women’s asylum until the hospital closed in 1962.

Seili is part of Finland’s history of science and its institutions can be compared to its European counterparts like Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris which was founded in 1656.

Själö Herbarium is a dramatic and spacial study, an event and an encounter that unfolds together with the public. The work features fictive and biographical voices and conversations; it combines documentary and essay forms with music composed for a choir that performs the role of the witness.

The documentary and fictional texts create an archive of perspectives that narrate the island in a way that has not been and cannot be recorded.

Själö Herbarium is a record of plants collected on the island. The knowledge gathered from herbs, flowers and the wider ecology becomes the ground and framework for the audience to move through.

Lotta Petronella’s words about the work:

For the last nine years, I have been working on Själö, a small island in the Baltic Sea, shaped like a bird, named after seals & souls. An island embodying hundreds of years of institutional violence and hauntings. The first institution was the church, in 1619, to store away the Lepers & those without a holy spirit later it became a mental institution, transformed into a women’s asylum.

those deported here

were brought across the waters by force

forced to stay

forced out of life

In 1962 the Archipelago Research Institute was set up in the old hospital buildings. The researchers work in rooms that used to be patient cells, they collect samples to create a time series

reading the land

reading the waters

The haunting is everywhere, it’s in the structure of the buildings & the blueprints, the way spaces are created & arranged. The laboratory of aquariums to study invasive crabs resembles the old cells I keep returning to this place during different seasons, moon phases.

I keep coming back To the island. The wreck. The myth. The plants. Digging gently for the roots, the botanical evidence, creating seedlings, small libraries of care. The islands ask back:

What are you looking for?

Why are you looking?

On stage:

Cécile Orblin, Gabriela Ariana, Anna Jussilainen, Laura Naukkarinen, Lotta Petronella, Heta Pyhäjärvi, Alma Rajala, Kristina Vahvaselkä and musician Jean-Michel Kampara

Production group:

Concept: Lotta Petronella / Script, direction and installation: Lotta Petronella / Fictional voices and monologues: Seppo Parkkinen / Costumes, props and textile art: Maedhbh McMahon / Wooden sculptures: Joni Judén / Lighting and technology: Antton Kainulainen / Poster art work: Laura Miettinen / Graphic design and script editing: Kaitlyn D. Hamilton / Communications: Aurora Ala-Hakula / Producer: Kristina Vahvaselkä / Production: Själö Workgroup (Petronella – Parkkinen – Vahvaselkä) & Kolmas Tila

The languages used in the performance: English, Finnish, and Swedish