‘‘[...] The light of the future doesn't, even for a second, stop wounding us: it is here to brand us in all our everyday actions, with anxiety, even in the trust that gives us life.’’
—‘Il pianto della scavatrice’, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1956

‘‘What did August Sander tell his sitters before he took their pictures? And how did he say it so that they all believed him in the same way?
Did he simply say that their photographs were going to be a recorded part of history?
And did he refer to history in such a way that their vanity and shyness dropped away?’’
—‘About Looking’, John Berger

‘‘He observed how strangely the people standing in a row with their figures bent slightly forward and their clothes plastered by the wind to the shape of their bodies resembled naked statues. On their pedestal of earth they looked unfamiliar and noble.’’
—‘The Voyage Out’, Virginia Woolf, 1915

‘‘[Memory] is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.’’
—‘Excavation and Memory’, Walter Benjamin

‘‘There is no other origin for beauty than the wound, one distinctive and different for each of us and hidden or visible, which we all bear within us’’
—Jean Genet

‘‘They offered me the office, offered me the shop
They said I’d better take anything they’d got
Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?
Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?

Career opportunity the one that never knocks
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock.’’
—‘Career Opportunities’, The Clash

‘‘I am a monster, do you say? No! I am the people! I am an exception? No! I am the rule; you arethe exception! You are the chimera; I am the reality!’’
—Gwynplaine, ‘The Man Who Laughs’, Victor Hugo

‘‘Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.’’
—Hito Steyerl

‘‘The photographer must turn the facsimile precision of appearances that characterises the camera into a metaphor for other imprecise, dense, secret languages that link the dimensions of time and space, the imaginary and the real in things.’’
—Nelly Schnaith

‘‘If the themes sometimes blur, they only recur somewhat later, all the more clearly, virtually identical. Yet these repetitions, these tiny variations, halts, regressions, can give rise to modifications—though barely perceptible—eventually moving quite far from the point of departure.’’
—Alain Robbe-Grillet

‘‘The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be’’.
—Hannah Arendt, ‘The Human Condition’

‘‘The dream of love that has conditioned women to undertake the care work of their husbands and children is today transformed into the care that knowledge workers exercise over the body of the company through the sentimental relationship that they tend to develop with their own projects (research, pages, photographs, drawings, words, films, etc.).’’
—Cristina Morini