How can documentary be made with others, rather than about them? In this workshop, artist Lilah Benetti invites participants to consider documentary as a relational practice shaped through collaboration, attention, and shared presence.

Moving beyond extractive or observational models, the session explores how images can emerge through dialogue, trust, and ongoing exchange. Through discussion, reflective exercises, and practical approaches to working with moving image, participants will explore methods for developing documentary projects grounded in care, reciprocity, and responsiveness to place. Drawing on Benetti’s transdisciplinary practice, the workshop considers how film can hold atmosphere, duration, and affect, positioning documentary as a collective process of making meaning together.

WHEN: Thursday 14 May 12-2:30pm
WHERE: Arts Lab, Level 1, Arts and Cultural Building, Monash Road, Building 159 (MAP), next to the George Paton Gallery. 
REGISTRATIONS OPEN SOON

Lilah Benetti (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist working across contemporary art and cinema, with moving image as their primary material. Engaging cinema as a medium shaped by ritual, attention, and transmission, their practice moves between cinematic film and spatial installation, treating narrative filmmaking and experimental moving image as parallel sites within the same inquiry. Grounded in research as relation, Benetti approaches still and moving image as fluid and porous, shaped through long-term collaboration, dialogue, and attentiveness to place. Working with sound, performance, and research-based collaboration, their practice explores how images hold duration, atmosphere, and affect, and how meaning is carried through presence and absence rather than resolution. Photography functions within their practice as documentation and as a thinking tool, contributing to a working archive through which light, gesture, and presence are tested and held across multiple forms.