freethought is a collective working in public research and in curating concepts of urgency.

Irit Rogoff, Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Massimiliano Mollona, Louis Moreno and Nora Sternfeld formed freethought in 2011. Traversing disciplines, blending influences, and borrowing forms freethought experiments with new combinations of criticism and practice in the arts.

For 2016 Bergen Assembly, freethought focused on its continuing collective interest: Infrastructure. By looking at many different understandings of this keyword – from 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 emerged as the invisible force of manifest culture today. This large-scale investigation reworked the term away from the language of planners and technocrats to put to creative and critical use within the cultural sphere.

Throughout 2015-16 freethought led a programme of public seminars, invited guest lectures and independent research in Bergen with the intention of developing a collective body of research and insights. This research, an interrogation of infrastructure on a local and global scale of ecology, finance, administration, labour, communication, hospitality, and the basic act of assembling culminated in a programme of exhibitions, discursive platforms, publications and artistic commissions opening for the Bergen Assembly in September 2016.

• Rogoff, Irit; Moreno, Louis; Mallona, Massomilliano; Harney, Stefano and Sternfeld, Nora. 2016. Infrastructure. In: "Infrastructure", Bergen Assembly, Norway, 1 September - 1 October 2016. [Show/Exhibition]
• Rogoff, Irit. 2016. An Anecdoted Archive of Exhibition Lives. In: "An Anecdoted Archive of Exhibition Lives", Bergen Assembly, Norway, September 2016. [Show/Exhibition]

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/27225