At the start of the twenty-first century, French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman caused somewhat of a stir with an essay about four photographs from the middle of the twentieth century.¹ The photographs, taken in 1944 by Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, show the importance images can have for understanding history. With his analysis and reprinting of them, Didi-Huberman sought to expose the futility of the claim that there is such a thing as the unimaginable. Finally, these images show that the existence of an outside - of the camp, of the image frame, of one's own subjectivity - is the ultimate condition of resistance.

More or less at the same time as the publication of Didi-Huberman's text, the Dutch artist Renzo Martens completed his first video project, Episode I (2003), for which he travelled to war-torn Chechnya. In this work, the artist entered the image frame, filming himself among professional image producers - photojournalists, cameramen and political and humanitarian fieldworkers - and Chechen refugees. Four years later, for Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) he repeated the performance in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation immersed in violence and trenchant iniquity, and which similarly exists in the West via mediatisation of these miseries. By being on location and becoming part of the images produced in the region, Martens not only shows but also enforces the ongoing erasure of the 'outside' for the people of Congo - an erasure conceived in terms of globalisation, in that the reality of the Western capitalist world has become part of the Congo's reality (through, amongst others, development workers, economic investors, political involvement and other professionals - including this