During its 12-year history (1988-2000), the Raging Roses Theater provided female theater artists with an internationally unique opportunity to strengthen their professional identities. The Raging Roses brought together over a hundred distinguished artists from all over Finland, as well as the Nordic and Baltic countries. Its operations were supported by prominent women in both politics and business. Female cooperation, which has often been dismissed as impossible, instead became a driving force. At the beginning there were no guarantees: if you want to come along, do; but you might not get paid. Starting from nothing, we would make art.

The Raging Roses tackled in its repertoire the canon of western drama, with its masculine world view and gendered power structures, in unprecedented ways. The performances got under your skin. Years later, they are still vividly remembered.

The Raging Roses – online exhibition

The Raging Roses were a unique phenomenon in both the Nordic and European theater scene, and the important work of this theater must be preserved. The aim of this project is to create an online exhibition on the history of the Raging Roses. Our work group will be responsible for putting together the online exhibition, while the Theater Museum will be responsible for digitizing the photo materials and publishing and maintaining the site at www.teatterimuseo.fi.

This online exhibition will be like any other museum exhibition, except it will be virtual. With texts in three languages (Finnish, Swedish, English), it will make available both nationally and internationally an important piece of Finnish theater history.

In addition to theater history, this online exhibition on the Raging Roses will also be much more. Through the exhibition, you can follow the various phases of the project as a social-artistic process as well as the personal development trajectories of the participating female artists.

There is still much work to be done: we need to sort through the existing material; write and translate the exhibit texts; get the material into publishable form; and design the visual and technical solutions for putting up and maintaining the site. In order to accomplish these goals, we need your help.
The total budget of this online exhibit is over 30,000€, with most of this still to be gathered. We hope to collect 15,000€ through crowdfunding, in order to get the project started. The rest of the money we hope to secure through various grants.

Help make the Raging Roses online exhibition possible!

You can contribute to this online exhibition by making a funding yourself, and also by sharing this crowdfunding site with your friends. Persons contributing up to 100 euros will have their names published among the list of donors; those funding more than 100 euros will also be invited to the online exhibition launch party.

The rewards can be found on the right hand column; if you don’t find a reward for the amount of money you wish to invest, please contact us (pia.houni[at]uta.fi). There are three ways to pay for a reward: through online banking at a Finnish bank; by credit card (Visa and Mastercard) or by requesting an invoice to be paid to the campaign’s Holvi account.

Work group

writer/manuscript: Pia Houni
artistic consultant: Ritva Siikala
web designer: Lauri Koutaniemi
video and sound materials: Ina Aaltojärvi
Translation (Swedish): Susanna Ringbom
Translation (English): Nely Keinänen