The Only Lasting Truth is Change: Voice, Seed, Brutality

Providing speculative weather forecasts, diving into platform brutality, listening to the sound of luggage, becoming a landscape, philosophising with gneiss, claiming the land, tracing the history of silk production, and dancing it all out, BEK invites you to join us in the November rain of Bergen for the symposium: The Only Lasting Truth is Change 2025.

With contributions from: Shuruq Harb, Marwa Arsanios, Open-weather, Carol Stampone, Geert Lovink, Touki & Rehana Zaman, Nasim Mashak, Omar Itani, Jenny Berger Myhre & Niklas Adam, DJ Daeva, Russell Haswell.

Taking its title from Octavia Butler’s seminal sci-fi novel Parable of the Sower (1993), which has frightening similarities to the political realities of today, we are exploring aspects of resistance and questions of how to practice. These ideas are expressed in the novel, in how the protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina pushes through experiences of horror and abandonment to find new ways of creating communities.

The three symposium days in Bergen will present a programme looking into the possibility of eco-social revolution through three notions: Voice, Seed, Brutality. Through voice we want to highlight projects that are connected to the historical and political background of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Projects that have recently been censored or cancelled in cultural institutions for fear of defunding or controversy. Voice can transform isolation into connection, making history heard, and voice is a medium that holds storytelling and thus can counter cultural extinction. Within the notion of seed inspired by Olamina´s Earthseed religion from Butler’s novel, a philosophy centred to the idea that ‘God is Change’, we aim to learn from degrowth, land use, indigenous knowledge systems, and the revolutionary potential in collective organising and alliance building around alternative approaches to cultivation, living and artistic practice. And lastly, while critically reflecting on the brutality of technofeudalism and platform economy, we want to address the need to rethink the use of internet technology. Brutality also reflects the polarised times we are living in, with increasing militarisation as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The Only Lasting Truth is Change is a symposium investigating how artistic practice and its methodologies are constantly changing in response to the shifting political, technological and ecological landscapes we live in. The 2025 and previous editions have sought to step away from a traditional discursive event of talks and debates. We aim instead for the symposium to be a thinking-in-process, where the cultural field has a chance to rethink our methodologies of research, production, presentation and dissemination, in response to a constantly shifting world around us.

The symposium is organised by BEK with support from Arts Council Norway, Fritt Ord Foundation, City of Bergen, Vestland County Council, KORO, Balansekunst and The Bergesen Foundation. 

BEK is a partner of the New Perspectives for Action network; a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

BEK—Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts—is an interdisciplinary production centre for art and technology, established in 2000 in Bergen, Norway. BEK develops, produces and showcases projects at the intersection of contemporary art, technology and social critique. BEK organises theoretical and hands-on workshops for creative practitioners and offers advice and development support to artists and art organisations. In its studios and labs, BEK hosts residencies for artists, focusing on research and experimentation. Through its discursive programme, BEK explores the social and political dimensions of technology.