Éric Baudelaire’s films are partly made with the people whose experiences they explore — revolutionary filmmakers and activists, teenagers, secessionists, and terrorists, all of whom have defied state institutions that assert the right to define reality. Their lives, their ethical choices, and their relationship to images are the exemplary materials of a cinema that rethinks the documentary form, and of an artistic practice that expands the films into broader display formats. Conceived as collective experiments, Baudelaire’s exhibitions include other works and archival documents stemming from his research and his exchanges with the protagonists, but they also feature productions by fellow artists and filmmakers, as well as contributions by a temporary community of guests who, in public conversations, expand the discussion beyond the field of art.

The same spirit imbues this book. In Make, Do, With, Erika Balsom and Marcella Lista trace the connection between those two fields of experience — films and exhibitions — in two texts that are themselves part of a long-term dialogue between the artist and the two authors: since 2015 with Marcella Lista, in the run‐up to the exhibition Après, which they co-curated at the Centre Pompidou; and with Erika Balsom, whose text, republished here, inspired their first meeting: The Reality-Based Community (2017), a vital essay that reconsiders the value of observational cinema today.