Kati Raatikainen is a choreographer, movement and embodiment pedagogue based in Helsinki. At the core of her artistic practice is an intersectional approach to the experience, ecosomatics, animality, different abilities, politics of the body and participation. Raatikainen has worked in various community based and/or participatory projects such as Ilmapiiri - a participatory and accessible choreography (Helsinki Biennial audience engagement 2025) and Valokeilassa koillinen (Zodiak 2019–2021). She is the artistic director of the dance group Dancing Diamonds for dancers with intellectual disability. Raatikainen holds MA degree in Choreography, BA in Dance pedagogy and has studied somatic movement therapy and accessible yoga.
Milla Martikainen is a performance artist, scenographer and pedagogue whose work explores the thresholds between bodies, environments, and fields of knowledge, where familiar rules begin to falter and something new finds room to emerge. Her practice moves between different genres of performance, with a persistent focus on ecological and social transformation. Martikainen has worked with various venues in Finland and abroad including Viirus theater, & theater, ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Baltic Circle, Duvteatern and Von Krahl Theater. She holds MA degrees from Aalto University and Theatre Academy Helsinki, chairs Mustarinda association that works for ecological reconstruction, and teaches sustainable performance design at the Theatre Academy.
Martikainen and Raatikainen have collaborated for over ten years. Their joint works include Sotku ja rakkaus (Zodiak 2026), Principia (Circo – Center for New Circus, 2022, Mad House Helsinki, 2024), Quartetto (2019-2022, including f.e Tampere Theatre festival, Edinburgh Fringe), Acts of care (2017–2020, including Prague Quadriennale 2019), Yhteis(t)yö (with Luka dog, Zodiak 2016), Titled (Theatre academy 2014).
Productions
Mess and Love (2026)
Mess and Love (Sotku ja rakkaus) is a performance in which performers moving in different ways eat, make a mess, caress, and sink into horror facing the unknown future.
Mess and Love explores what it means to live as a human being in a time of climate and environmental crises. The mess humanity has created is irreversible, and a disturbed ecosystem cannot be replaced with a new one.
The work examines the circulation of nourishment through the transformation of edible materials. Mess and Love sketches a human being who is sincere, dependent, desiring, and destructive. Sensuality and destructive force exist side by side, proposing a form of humanity in which responsibility and pleasure together build a different kind of relationship with systems that fail to recognize the interdependence between humans and ecosystems.
The choreography of Mess and Love is guided by the mouth. The mouth ties our bodies to ecological connections. It reaches for something to put inside itself, serving as a passageway between nourishment, breath, voice, the external, and the internal space. The mouth makes a mess, sucks, bites, licks, and becomes bewildered. Everything that exists in the world passes through our mouths and our bodies.
The inspiration for the work has been the book Disabled Ecologies by artist and researcher Sunaura Taylor, in which ecology and disability theory are examined in parallel. In working on the piece Mess and Love, sustainable working methods that take into account different needs have been practiced. Some of the performers in the piece use wheelchairs.
Mess & Love premieres on Zodiak Stage Autumn 2026.