One in five people have chronic pain. While it causes a lot of suffering and costs society a fair amount of money, pain remains under-reported. We try to measure it on a scale of 1 to 10 but have no idea what those numbers mean. Often words fall short. Can we ever really know what another person in pain experiences?

Sanne Bloemink has had constant nerve pain since 2010. In her search for a solution, she connects her own experiences with knowledge from the fields of medicine, philosophy, literature and history. This way, Bloemink travels back to the Middle Ages, draws from Greek mythology, explores what new technologies can mean for pain management, and what the work of Susan Sontag and Marina Abramović, among others, can teach us. Bloemink provides nothing less than a new way of thinking and speaking about pain.