Being a co-convenor that primarily operates as an educational institution means that the topic of learning-with lies close to the everyday workings of Bergen School of Architecture (BAS). Architecture is the discipline that shapes our school’s curriculum. We are, however, equally as committed to the role the practice of teaching has in the formation of architects: how do we create situations for critical thinking to thrive, as well as critical action? Following this tradition, we have been searching for various modes of engagement that respond to Bergen Assembly’s invitation to ‘dissolve monopolistic top-down pedagogies in favour of an education organically shaped through multilateral exchanges, mutualities, and solidarities’. For BAS it has been important to look for modes where the politics is not defined by intentions but by inherence in practice, learning-with situations that enable a redistribution of power by translating potentialities into actualities.

For a long time already, BAS has been wary of the authority of ‘The Institution’ and, as such, has always sought to question the boundaries between subject and object, teacher and student, thinking and making. In order to carry these transgressions into the convening itself and to shape an edition that embraces our multiplicity and avoids the limits of representation or speaking-on-behalf, all teachers and students have been able to enter into direct dialogue with our co-convenors, Ravi Agarwal and Adania Shibli. For the overall discussions around themes, formats, and venues, which began in June 2023, BAS formed a smaller group consisting of the rector, two teachers, and two students – namely Emma Nilsson, Cecilie Andersson, Tom Chamberlain, Adam Jaghouar, and Rebecca Tesfa. To create further opportunities for agency and ownership, we made use of already existing formats at BAS such as the Cross Courses, as well as transforming our curriculum with the BAS Trajectories courses reshaping the 2025 fall semester.

To conceive of alternative institutional infrastructures, we imagine our school poised on the edge of the fjord as a kind of harbour: a hospitable nexus of knowing and unknowing. We think of the harbour as both a support structure and refuge, wherein thinking, making, and doing are secure in their vulnerabilities and vital uncertainties. For BAS the harbour is a very real place that allows for the physical imperative of gathering, and yet it is also a figurative space that allows for reflection on the promises and responsibilities carried by institutions. This conceptualisation of the harbour has shaped our engagement with Bergen Assembly 2025. 

As a site, the harbour operates across elements, scales, and affinities, not as an entity but as a set of relations with the here, the nearby, and the distance invoked by the horizon. As an idea it informs an attempt to hold on to something in language as much as in space. In this, our concerns have often focused on looking after what words can’t do and taking care of the illegible as much as what can be articulated. This is perhaps to express a ‘resistance to explicit formulation’[1] where the unspoken is made actual in ways that open up for a tangible knowledge of multiple realities.

Here we have found John Law’s conception of ‘non coherence’, as formulated around allegory, instructive regarding the knowledges and modes of engagement we wish to embrace: ‘In allegory, the realities made manifest do not necessarily have to fit together.’ [2] Law argues for the ‘craft of saying or representing things indirectly’. This implies that we are capable of hearing or reading things between the lines, just as it asserts a space in which to safeguard the illegible, invisible, or illogical. To do so is to offer uncertainty, ambiguity, and encounter as a resistance to ’dictatorships of knowing’ [3] produced by the ‘straightforward’ or the explanatory. It is a call for simultaneity and the kind of poetic knowledge that has informed much of our approach leading up to the running period of across, with, nearby. It is also fundamental to the role of ‘tracing’ that has evolved as a technique to attend to knowledge as it unfolds and proliferates.

To frame knowledge as poetic is to allow language and materials to be both situated and to float. Engaging with poetic knowledge, one can learn from what Trinh T. Minh Ha calls ‘speaking nearby’. [4] This is a kind of speaking that requires a continued listening, which resists language’s tendency towards the linear, instead concerning itself with its materialities and instabilities that are both elusive and precise. It is a speaking where the textures of the chosen language, be it a sound, an image, or words, become more than representations of the world; rather, they create their own worlds:

In other words, a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from
the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it. A
speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening up to other possible moments of transition — these are forms of
indirectness well understood by anyone in tune with poetic language.[5]

Such transitions and proliferations of knowing are central to our understanding of ‘tracing’ as a mode of attempting to hold on to meaning by letting it shift and move forwards. Generative, rather than simply alternative, tracing is an encounter that points without grasping, activating the scientific and poetic spaces of learning as a kind of shimmer or resonance in which to move between sensate immersion and the reflective distance of representation. It is necessarily a space of vulnerability, a touching distance in which intimacy is still possible. The work, practices, and processes unfolding and assembling here invite for both critical thinking and critical action, engagements in which we all become tracers: across, with, nearby. 
 


[1] John Law, After Method: Mess in Social Science, (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2004), p. 87.
[2] Ibid.
[3] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, (New York: Routledge, 1994).
[4] Nancy N. Chen, ‘Speaking Nearby: A conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha’, Visual Anthropology Review, 8.1 (1992), pp. 82–91.
[5] Ibid. p. 87.