Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos Announced as Convenors of Bergen Assembly 2028

Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos. Courtesy Bergen Assembly. Photo: Stian Servoss

Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos Announced as Convenors of Bergen Assembly 2028

Bergen Assembly 2028
Bergen, Norway
https://en.bergenassembly.no/

Bergen Assembly has announced the appointment of Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos as Convenors for its 2028 edition, marking the beginning of the triennial’s sixth iteration.

Working collaboratively for several years across exhibitions, publications, performances, seminars, and interdisciplinary research projects, Pietroiusti and Ramos have developed a shared practice situated at the intersection of art, ecology, science, spirituality, and more-than-human forms of knowledge. Their work frequently engages with questions of consciousness, coexistence, perception, and systems of relation. Jointly, they will devote the Bergen Assembly’s shape-shifting form to thinking through the relationship between what is told Bergen Assembly and what is presented at the Assembly, and how these are enacted.  In the interest of fine-tuning its mission, Ramos and Pietroiusti  seek to experiment with different ways of convening people, objects, and ideas. They will bring together historical, biological, material, and philosophical subject-matters, be they planetary or situated, rigorous, speculative, or transgressive.

Dances and other prayers. Cats and robots. Myths. Snakes.
Rhythms or algorithms. Death, tenderness, friction and
contemplation. Playing. Crying. The unbearable. Rituals and
systems. Sleep.

They aim to investigate the connection between arts, crafts, words, meanings, and worlds; how ancient mnemonic devices were at times regarded with suspicion, as forms of artifice or trickery; the ways fish draw with stones; the elusiveness of machine intelligence; and the question of consciousness across both living beings and robots. These are some of the topics that interest Pietroiusti and Ramos. From ancient and present understandings of technē to the functioning of ecosystems, from animal play to the prosthetic capacity of the imagination: Bergen Assembly 2028 will propose to demystify, re-calibrate, and re-orient how we think of the present while seeking agency within it.Repetition.
Release.
Repair.
The smell of grass.
The feeling of home.
Love. Loss.
ECSTASY.

Central to their collaborative trajectory is the long-term project The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, initiated in 2018 and developed through exhibitions, seminars, and publications bringing together artists, scientists, and thinkers around questions of consciousness and more-than-human intelligence. In 2025, the project culminated in a publication co-edited by the pair. Their previous collaborations also include Persones Persons (8th Biennale Gherdëina, 2022), Songs for the Changing Seasons (1st Klima Biennale Wien, 2025), and Bodies of Water (13th Shanghai Biennale, 2020–21), realised together with Marina Otero Verzier and Mi You under the artistic direction of Andrés Jaque. For Bergen Assembly 2028, Pietroiusti and Ramos will work in close dialogue with the city of Bergen through a long-term process of research, collaboration, and public programming. Part of this research phase will unfold publicly, beginning with a Prelude gathering on September 12, 2026 dedicated to questions of technology and ecstasy.

Bergen Assembly works through long-term artistic processes and collaborations to realise an in-depth project in the city every three years. It aims to strengthen the role of art in society and to give space to practices that challenge and examine our present, including practices that may be complex, vulnerable, or under pressure. Each edition is shaped by invited convenors, who establish the conditions for collective work, artistic agency, and shared responsibility, allowing every iteration to take on its own distinct form.Through collaboration with artists, communities, and civil society, Bergen Assembly contributes to a public sphere for art and knowledge where new perspectives, connections, and communities can emerge – locally rooted in Bergen, in dialogue with the world.

Lucia Pietroiusti stewards research and experimentation in art, ecology, and systems. She is Head of Research & Emergence at Hartwig Museum, Amsterdam, opening in 2028; and the curator of the 6th Autostrada Biennale (Prizren, Kosovo, 2027). She founded Serpentine’s General Ecology project (2018-2025); and curated Sun & Sea by Rugile Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė (58th Venice Biennale and tour, 2019-2025). Pietroiusti is Chair of the Board of Trustees at Forma, London.

Filipa Ramos, PhD, is a writer and curator whose long-term research investigates art’s relationship to ecology. She is particularly interested in animals and time-based media. Ramos teaches at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art
Design, Basel and is Curator of the 2027 edition of LIAF. Her most recent book, The Artist as Ecologist (2025), discusses the ways in which contemporary artists embrace environmentalism.