For 2016 Bergen Assembly, freethought focuses on its 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 emerges as the invisible force of manifest culture today. This large-scale investigation will wrest the term away from the language of planners and technocrats to put to creative and critical use within the cultural sphere.

An Anecdoted Archive of Exhibition Lives is the segment on infrastructure of affect, assembles the narratives of significant exhibitionary moments from around the globe who produce a veritable polyphony of revelation. Each interviewee described a pivotal moment in their life and a shift in their understanding through an encounter with an exhibition.