.bergen assembly 2016


 freethought is an Artistic Director of 2016 Bergen Assembly.

For the Bergen Assembly, freethought will focus on its current collective interest: Infrastructure. By looking at many different understandings of this keyword -- from the legacies of colonial and early capitalist systems of governance to current conditions of the financialization of the cultural field to the subversive possibilities of thinking and working with infrastructures as sites of affect and contradiction -- 'infrastructure' emerges as the invisible force of manifest culture today.

This will be a large-scale investigation of how the term 'infrastructure' can be wrested away from the language of planners and technocrats and put to creative and critical use within the cultural sphere. Throughout 2015-16 freethought have produced a series of public events, in Bergen and elsewhere, to prod the term using critical concepts gleaned from the study of management and political economy, urbanism and visual culture, and performance and curating.

The individual and collective research of the members of freethought will culminate in a programme of exhibitions, discursive platforms, publications and artistic commissions opening for the Bergen Assembly in September 2016.

The programme launches with THE INFRASTRUCTURE SUMMIT on Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 September 2016 in Bergen. This two-day discursive and performative event will bring together internationally renowned writers, curators and artists investigating the nature of infrastructure in times of economic disparity, ecological catastrophe, expulsion and forced migration.

See the project develop here: bergenassembly.no