The acceleration of the decades-long process of annihilating so many Palestinian life forms, including art, has turned the question of how to engage artistically into an existential one. Alongside this, a harsher, recurring personal struggle has been: what does it mean for me to contribute over the past couple of years to convening this edition of the Bergen Assembly, when the Israeli military have been attacking and killing artists, destroying hundreds of art and cultural spaces, and burying tens of thousands of artworks underneath rubble in Palestine? An answer to this is impossible to reach while sifting through the ensuing spiritual debris.

What does become patent, however, is the need to open up to the possibility of learning in conjunction with what has been subjugated and what we cannot fathom, instead of getting paralysed by the acts of those holding control, who are capable of, and are inflicting death and destruction. This, at least, will have us avoid the risk of enabling the violence of the coloniser and the powerful; reject that they should have the final word, and that their indifference to pain shall prevail. Nor are we to seek replicating their power as a way of not feeling defeated: power won’t become any more just once it shifts hands.

Exploring methods to learn with resurfaces in this edition of Bergen Assembly as a way to forsake a hierarchy that is essential to power, domination, and devastation. The proposal to learn with is called in to assist us in imagining other paths and possibilities, together with the recurring tension of presences and absences, creations and destructions, and invisible forms of structural violence and deep pains.

Learning with and learning through speak of knowing as a situated practice, embedded in constantly shifting environments, not demanding fixity and finity to exist, and allowing a place for vulnerability and uncertainty to be part of their process. Such practice of knowing embraces ideas that do not seek to be exclusionary for them to unfold. These are often ideas and even elements that have been abandoned from the register of dominant hegemonic knowledges that were identified as scientific and objective with the onset of Modernity, and which root the hierarchy of the subject-object duo as the base for any process of learning.

A knowledge in flux, in relation, in complexity, in part; this is what Aimé Césaire could name as poetic knowledge. Scientific knowledge, according to Césaire, often fails to grasp objects in their complex relation to others in their collective setting. More so, scientific knowledge seeks to isolate phenomena and, in the process, fails to comprehend the social and spatial relations and collectivities within which these phenomena exist.1 At the same time, rather than thinking of poetic knowledge here as a critique of scientific or institutional knowledges, it is called in to trace and acknowledge the critical effects of the latter. Poetic knowledge can be perceived as a space where separate entities are experienced as a continuation; as one with the other, rather than being placed in opposition to each other.

In a 1970 interview conducted by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK, an artist from the avant-garde collective Gruppe66 draws a circle, and parallel to that, a line. Between the circle and the line there remains a space, which maintains the existence of the two shapes alongside each other, encompassing all the possible and impossible links and trajectories that can arise between the two. In other words a dialogical space emerges here to exist with, converse with, learn with, know with, imagine with, and create with; all the while, we witness how the circle and the line stretch alongside each other and not against each other. A neighbourly relation starts to materialise between them.

Some works and modes of engagements introduced in this Bergen Assembly ponder the circle, which might demand to make itself bigger in the deletion of its initial self. Alongside it is the line’s ability to grow, to extend in different directions, assisting us in imagining an ever-expanding community or sense of kinship that is in motion, supported by the act of neighbouring, or Mujawara, as introduced by Munir Fasheh, whence an ethos of mutual care can be instigated. New or old, human or more-than-human, as ‘neighbours’, both hold an equal position in relation to one another. Thus we hear now Imruʾ al-Qais as he recites in his 6th-century Diwan: ‘Oh Neighbour we are strangers here, and every stranger to a stranger is a relation’.

The act of ‘neighbouring’ forges commitment through intimacy towards what we are close to. It does so not in terms of sheer vicinity, but in harbouring mutuality, sharedness, and reciprocity. This is a commitment that can unfold within the least central places: at a threshold, a shoreline, a surface, all of which links an inside with an outside. A manifestation of this form of commitment can be retrieved from Polynesian mythology, where societies place human creation within the more-than-human, in sea creatures that are treated as the ancestors of humans. What follows from this is an understanding of human culture as being part of the more-than-human nature, with both taking care of each other as they neighbour one another, rather than exert control. This allows experiences of mutuality, closeness, and care, all enabled by love as it takes social shape.

Love is approached here in its ability to act as a force to enable learning with, while countering indifference — both social and political — and subsequent injustices. As a public force, love appears as a necessity for acting and interacting. Apart from it being a vigour in processes like the artistic, love may assist us in imagining social and political non-instrumentalist relationships of togetherness and closeness, as well as maintaining openness as we face pain that is being condoned by indifference.

This is an indifference that allows people who seek life in safer places — after being chased away by political wars, economic hardships, disasters induced by climate change — to drown in the sea almost everyday (the sea too is now being experienced as a genocidal site). Then, once they reach land, systems of exclusions turn the stricken survivors — those who have not drowned — into refugees, drowning them in institutional subjugation, alienation, and social exclusion.

How are we to challenge all of this by learning with? For a start, we wish to open this door to engage artistically, socially, and politically with all that can help us go beyond the current structures that are leading us towards destruction. What follows is with you.