The 7th Futurological Congress - The Future of the Contact Zone
18–19 October, Tårnsalen, Lysverket - KODE 4
Free entry (please book a free ticket via QR code below - or at the door)
Saturday is the opening day of the ‘7th Futurological Congress: The Future of the Contact Zone’, which takes place over two days in Tårnsalen at KODE with talks, performances, and screenings to explore the ‘contact zone’ as a space of convergence.
The Futurological Congress is a hybrid artistic, intellectual, and speculative gathering — part exhibition, part symposium, part performative scenography. The Bergen chapter focuses on the ‘contact zone’: charged spaces where species, systems, and sensibilities converge. Today, these zones extend far beyond physical terrains into algorithmic ecologies, multispecies entanglements, and blurred boundaries between human and machine.
Through talks, performances, film screenings, and visual interventions, the congress stages discourse as a shared, sensorial, and speculative act. The invited contributors include artists, researchers, and thinkers who engage with themes of autoethnography, code-switching, vernacular expression, mimicry, and the politics of intelligibility. Together, they ask: What does it mean to think, create, and interpret when these actions emerge from more-than-human intelligences?
Conceived as a two-day programme, the Bergen edition unfolds in Tårnsalen at KODE — a venue whose architectural specificity and atmosphere become part of the scenography itself. The 7th Futurological Congress features Mari Bastashevski, Tanya Garcia-Anton, Ed Keller, Adam Kleinman, Pierre Huyghe, Larissa Mendoza Straffon, Patricia Reed, Hito Steyerl, Martinus Suijkerbuijk, and Amir Yatziv. The Bergen edition is conceived by Julieta Aranda and David Rych.
Further contributions by: Pierre Brassau (Peter the chimpanzee), Creativity Machine, Sougwen Chung, Documentation of Arnuf Rainer in collaboration with a Chimpanzee
The event is part of the research project AKIN KIND at KMD/UiB and takes place in the frame of Bergen Assembly 2025
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Programme:
The 7th Futurological Congress - The Future of the Contact Zone
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Saturday 18. Oct The Future of the Contact Zone – Day 1
13.00 Welcome and intro: Julieta Aranda and David Rych
13.30 Larissa Mendoza Straffon
14.30 Katya Garcia-Anton
15.30 Break
16.00 Ed Keller
17.00 Mari Bastashevski
18.30 Amir Yatziv - Peter Is Back: A Machine-Performance
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Sunday 19. Oct The Future of the Contact Zone – Day 2
12.00 Martinus Suijkerbuijk
13.00 Patricia Reed
14.00 Adam Kleinman
15.00 Break
15.30 Hito Steyerl in conversation with Julieta Aranda and David Rych
17.00 Pierre Huyghe - video screening Untitled (Human Mask)
Exhibition open until 19.00
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Bergen Assembly 2025 Programme
Day 1
Day 2
