1938. En réaction aux photographies diffusées par le gouvernement espagnol pour inciter les intellectuels européens à se mobiliser contre l’insurrection fasciste, Virginia Woolf écrit Trois Guinées. 2002. Susan Sontag publie Devant la douleur des autres, passionnante réflexion sur la vision moderne de la violence et de l'atrocité. Deux invitations à modifier notre appréciation des images, mais aussi de la guerre, ou encore de la conscience. Faut-il voir pour savoir ? Où est la frontière  entre compassion et voyeurisme? Dès lors, quelle forme scénique proposer en regard de ces textes pour que le rapport entre pensée et image advienne et que le « dire » en surgisse ? Isabelle Dumont, Annik Leroy, et Virginie Thirion, confrontent leurs pratiques autour de ces questions.

In 1938, Virginia Woolf wrote Three Guineas, as a reaction to the photographs sent by the Spanish government to encourage European intellectuals to rise up against the Fascist rising. In 2002, Susan Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others, a compelling consideration of the modern view of violence and atrocities, encouraging us to change our attitude to the use and meaning of imagery, as well as to the nature of war, the limits to compassion and the obligations of the conscience.

Do you have to see in order to know? Where is the line which separates compassion from voyeurism? When the TV warns us that some of the pictures we are about to see may be disturbing, is it a warning or an invitation? If so, to what?

It was the actual fact of being faced with endless pictures of pain which left the thoughts of Woolf and Sontag in turmoil, and then set them to work. In front of us, but that means out there, at a distance, as a reaction…  And leading to the question of what spatial, visual and scenic form could be offered in respect of these texts so that the dynamic relationship between thought and image becomes concrete, tangible, so that the “message” appears with its power to ask questions and its insistence on spreading? Isabelle Dumont, Annik Leroy, and Virginie Thirion, reveal the way they deal with these questions.