Gina Pane (1939-1990) used her own body as the source of her aesthetic projects, as the material and basis of her artistic production. She was a leading figure in body art in France in the 1970s and 1980s and explored the notion of a ‘language of the body’ in which pain and self-harming were seen as a source of knowledge, as a means of opening the self to others and to the ‘transindividual body, ’ to quote her own words. This article does not proffer a psychoanalytical interpretation of her work, but rather examines her writings and the photographic relics of her ‘body actions, ’ to shed light on the new passageways she establishes between action, body and image and to explore their meaning.