1
To address a world in which violence, human rights infringements, and climate change have become urgent, immediately present, and intricately interwoven, we need to break from past trajectories. To express a multiplicity of knowledges requires a recalibration of the homogenisations proposed by modernity and currently embedded within institutions and their attendant discussions and discourses. Engaging in meaningful conversations through practices that can overcome deep pedagogical colonisations and the flattening of different worlds implies adopting perspectives that foster learning with these engaged and critical endeavours. This is vital for different futures. Cultivating a sense of neighbourliness from afar, as well as modes of empathetic, reciprocal collaborations could offer new possibilities of seeing and being in the world.

My repeated visits to Bergen have enabled many encounters with people and institutions as a way of shaping ideas for this assembly. From afar, this port city seemingly appears to be all fiords and glaciers, ever distant from the hot, semi-arid New Delhi, my home. It holds questions of futures that concern us all, and which have also informed my own outlook, pursuits, and artistic practice. Here, histories of ancient trading routes meld with new waves of immigration and shifting identities — a condition that too is familiar to the Indian subcontinent, as well as other places. Planetary questions about climate justice or contested knowledge systems are palpably alive. Leading scientific institutes are researching planetary changes such as melting arctic ice, post-glacial landscape degradation, uncertainties regarding the Gulf Stream, and the impacts that deep-sea mining has on more-than-human ecosystems. Sami communities are asserting their own ancient, vital pedagogies as a basis of their worldmaking. Artists are pointing towards a shifting experience of the contemporary world. This is a microcosm of a world in flux.

Deeply illuminating conversations that I’ve experienced have included those with philosophers such as Arne Johan Vetlesen, who reflects on more-than-human limits, as well as with scientists like Eoghan Reeves, who periodically ventures 4000-metres deep into the oceans to test for gaseous metals. Speaking with numerous local artists and academics, and engaging with institutes including the Bjerknes Center for Climate Research revealed certain underlying struggles and anxieties. Leading a Cross Course alongside Katarina Dorothea Isaksen — a Sami artist, writer, politician, and activist — provided a glimpse into Joiking, a traditional form of song of the Sámi. Our course took place in the listening lodge at Jiennoghoatthi, an artwork dedicated to listening in the Bergen Mountains that was initiated by artist Elin Már Øyen Vister in dialogue with Sami artist and architect Joar Nango. Joiking actively evokes objects rather than describing them, and for me this suggests ways of being as knowing, an idea that resonates with ancient Indian philosophy.

Today we are contending with cruelties being waged on people and widespread suppressions of speech and liberty. To shift away from long trajectories of violence becomes an imperative. It is my belief that making new connections, transgressing pedagogic boundaries, and enacting deep listening could present possibilities. However, these are difficult and complex paths and raise questions such as: how can we truly listen to those whose worlds are different from ours, or to the more-than-human? Which perspectives need to be articulated? How is it possible to create new conversations from near and far between practices that are in fact similar despite having seemingly dissimilar conceptions? Can we create common grounds of love, empathy, and cultural tolerance as modes that allow these various formations to prosper?


2
The proposals for this assembly include a series of encounters between different practitioners and practices so that they might offer experiences of emergence. They include bringing together archives of suppressions through caste, queer, and feminist lenses; speaking of cultural and political relationships to the agrarian through ideas of land, seeds, tools, and labour; listening to more-than-human voices and tales; participating in aural everyday expressions of the rural as feminist landscapes; experiencing human bodies that are commodified through histories of caste and nature extractions; visualising deep sea and micro creatures; and participating in reindeer claims of land.

To think about Bergen Assembly, to create it, necessitates the address of all of these publics (and more). Could everyday assemblies, become the Assembly, albeit manifesting slightly differently, on a more public platform? These possibilities have informed the choices that we’ve made when selecting specific sites and venues for this edition. Among them are, for example, one of the oldest building in Bergen, Nonneseter, a small 12th-century monastery situated in the city centre; the Stranges Stiftelse, which served as a social institution and poorhouse for women over a number of centuries from 1609 to 1972; the seed bank at Landås library, which is part of the centrally-located Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek (Bergen Public Library); and the famous Bar Amundsen, formerly known as Terminus Whiskey Bar at a Terminus Hotel, from where the eponymous explorer Roald Amundsen departed for his last ever journey. We asked ourselves how these sites could become places of mutual learning and translation, and how they might be portals of poetic knowledge, curiosity, and insights.

Engaging with worlds that overflow with ephemeral processes, unheard voices, and murmurs from the unseen and excluded, not only expands ideas of justice, but also enables the understanding of their entangled existences. It is the fragments of verses, the ‘weeds’ beneath the cash crops, the hands that labour, the tiny creatures within the ice that constitute the multitude of life forms that become visible, heard, and acknowledged when we look across, with, nearby. Without this, life itself is denied.

All that said, it is important to remember that such fecundity must not be collapsed into a centralised idea of ‘inclusion’. Rather, it offers an opportunity to become more aware, tolerant, and imaginative together. The multiplicity decolonizes dominant perspectives to reveal hidden possibilities for shared survival. This is not about rejecting the present or longing for the past; instead, it is about embracing the potential for change, differently and yet, nonetheless, together.

Shifting positions of power by embracing diversity marks the beginning of empathy and learning with an altered position of humility and love: it might be as simple as kneeling down and putting an ear to the ground, creating awareness of what is already here and slowly unfolding.


I would like to thank the Curatorial Advisers, Margareta von Oswald and Damian Christinger, as well as Curatorial Assistant, Sukanya Deb.