Black and Blur for International Photo, PHOTO2024.
Cinematography by Abdul Yusef @rounddrop for PHOTO 2024

BLACK AND BLUR is a living, transdisciplinary anarchive by Lilah Benetti that maps Black Queer memory, cultural survival, and kinship across continents. Both a research project and a historical intervention, it challenges Western archival traditions by centring spiritual and speculative knowledge systems. Rather than treating the past as fixed, it foregrounds presence — a practice of continual return, reinterpretation, and relational storytelling grounded in cyclical approaches to memory and narrative. Spanning Australia, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Senegal, and the UK, the anarchive draws on analogue photography, oral testimony, experimental sound, and moving image to trace histories that resist containment.

Linguistic plurality — especially the presence of diasporic and First Nations languages — shapes how gender, kinship, and selfhood are expressed and understood across cultural contexts. Instead of seeking closure or linearity, Black and Blur embraces the unfinished and the in-between — where memory slips into myth, and stories move hand to hand, alive across generations and geography. It proposes a speculative, embodied form of archival practice — one that privileges intimacy, multiplicity, and proximity over classification or control.

The very first iteration of photographs from the Naarm series of Black and Blur was commissioned by International Photo for PHOTO2024 and presented as a series of twelve large-scale 3 x 4 metre portrait photographs. Installed at Footscray Community Arts, the work featured Black Queer individuals of both Indigenous and migrant heritage, forming part of the project's ongoing global archive.

This living archive includes contributions from Black Queer people across Africa, UK and Australia, some of whom remain unnamed in the public record for reasons of safety, privacy, or solidarity. For further information, please contact mgnt@lilahbenetti.com.