Landscapes, alternating with Sissi Outside, is a very visual work, without dialogue. This is why its display from the inside out for the casual passers-by of Turku makes so much sense. Both the landscapes with their scars from historical violence, and the images of Sissi performing seemingly meaningless acts on the island of Seili with its history of confinement, lends themselves for a double act of looking. The images are eerily beautiful, often - as in this image - merging into one another, and can be watched for their beauty only. However, elements such as barbed wire, dry earth, and Sissi’s haunting face, body poses that invoke hanging, jumping, or lying dead, bring in a second layer of meaning. But when the landscape images merge Seili and Spain, the confining world that is Sissi’s opens up. Thus, the historical legacy of the land itself inflects the seeming meaninglessness of the young woman’s acts. A question, then, lingers: is she mad, or is she the victim, or bearer, of the scars of history? The explication of the conception of madness to which the satellite exhibition is devoted begins here: precisely, in these images without dialogue. seemingly without content.

Framing the Film offers insight into the reasons why we made the film and the exhibition pieces, the concepts and ideas it shapes and stages, and the different issues that came up during the process. The photo shows a number of the characters who enact the different forms of madness. Each of these characters have a history that has driven them to madness. But in the present, they seek to regain sociality. Thanks to the analyst, they manage to at least acquire a bit of the social bonds that the violence of their history, or that of their ancestors, had broken. For, that is what madness emerges from: the breakage, the wreckage of social connections, ruined by violence. In the photo, we see, also, two children, dressed as medieval fools. Are they just fools, or also at risk of madness? the juxtaposition asks. The presence of children in our project is motivated by this ambiguity - the fear and the hope that these youngsters may escape the fate of the adults, if only we manage to treat them with social responsibility. And if the nurse - here, the musical nurse, devoted to calming the mad with audio harmony - figures in this portrait gallery, it may well be due to another form of madness.

Striking the Right Chord pursues this question further. Music is brought into analogy with the question of madness. As the Musical Nurse clearly believes, the chaotic noise the mad produce must be countered by the harmony of music. This is an analogy only, not a reality nor a theoretical position. But the issue underlying this fictional speculation - that of structure as a way out of chaos - may well be the road towards a helpful treatment of the psychotic patients. Françoise, the primary analyst and main character of the film, believes that “striking the right chord” makes it possible for the conversation to resonate - another musical term - with the patient’s madness. Through such an extreme, but not an intellectual, form of identification, the patient can b made to no longer feel alone. In this video, Françoise addresses bees - using the analogy of the dance of the working bees - and speaks with an old man who restores musical instruments. This allusion to the cultural history of music, and indirectly to the value of keeping those traditions alive, brings a sense of history - as shown in Landscapes - together with a sense of sociality, of bringing harmony as giving structure.

Whatever Happened to Sissi? is a conversation between the two actresses who just finished playing the scenes. Marjo Vuorela, with her great knowledge of psychosis, and Marja Skaffari, who, as a professional actress, put herself in the skin of the delusional young woman, unwind after the shoot talking about Sissi’s case. Marja seeks to understand what can cause such madness, and how Sissi could have been “cured”. The two women, still half-inside the characters they just played, wonder and ponder, and the intelligent questions and expert answers help the audience to get a grip on what violence does, and how we can deal with the consequences. Marja’s hand indicates her curiosity; Marjo’s intensely listening face expresses what matters most in such confrontations.
 

Sissi’s Treatment brings us back to Sissi, the primary patient of the project. Her traumatogenic experience of sexual abuse and parental neglect make her the prime victim of the social shortcomings that generate madness. Society condones violence, either through the wars waged at the instigation of leaders, or, as here, by blinding itself to what happens inside family homes, where children ought to be safe. Her psychoanalytic treatment is the most extensive analytic treatment in the project. Thanks to the superb acting of Finnish actress Marja Skaffari (here, watching her own image) and the inside knowledge of psychoanalyst Marjo Vuorela, the tensions, but also the identifications between Sissi and her analyst demonstrate clearly what problems face the treatment of madness, as well as the hopes of its possibility that emerge when the analyst dares join the patient. Sissi changes outfits to mark the way her delusion of being the Empress of Austria-Hungary is her self-protection; the preservation of her human dignity when violence tries to rob her of it.