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 seen 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, then 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.