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During Bergen Assembly’s opening days, I am asked to attend a number of mock funerals, including one for a Turkish pop star Belgin Sarılmışer was a singer who rose to fame in the 1980s with her album Woman of Agonies, which fused Turkish classical music with kitschy Egyptian love songs, flamenco, folk and rock Album-cover portraits of Belgin show her in glitzy jewellery and shoulder pads, a cascade of blonde hair falling across her face By the time she appeared on Turkish television in 1985, she had only one eye Her husband had thrown nitric acid on her face while she performed, but after surgery she continued to tour, blonde curls styled over the empty socket   Belgin is best known by her stage name, Bergen, which she chose after seeing a postcard of the Norwegian city, so the story goes This auspicious concurrence made her a sigil for the 2019 Bergen Assembly, Actually, the Dead are Not Dead, a triennial curated by twelve researchers, activists and artists that unfolded in venues around the city This year’s event is theory boot camp In a venue named after Belgin for the duration of the Assembly, the curators introduce the concept of ‘necropolitics’, which has been used to frame the work of the 140 artists included in the triennial Judith Butler’s famously dense treatise Frames of War (2015) — a text which examines the power wielded by states and sovereigns to decide who is entitled to live and who must die— is invoked as a guide to the politics of death But, in order to understand necropolitics, it’s necessary to trace it back a little further, to Giorgio Agamben and his complications of the categories of ‘life’ in Homo Sacer (1995) Agamben differentiates between ‘bare’ life, or life as a biological fact with no rights or guarantees, and political life, life qualified by the conditions and/or privileges of each citizen