Figa No Face: Lilah Benetti 2025

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The image is never neutral. Each photograph carries the weight of what has come before, folding into impressions, memories, and projections. Realities are not contained; they ripple across borders and reverberate outwards into the political present, hardening lines not only around land, but around bodies, kinship and possibility.

Figa No Face emerges from Black and Blur, a living [an]archive developed across Australia, Africa and the UK that resists visibility as resolution. It engages where reverberation deepens, through conversations across West Africa with elders, activists, artists, organisers, sex workers, voodoo priestesses and others who live at the intersection of marginalised Black life. These exchanges, grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems that hold histories of gender non-conformity, shape my practice, where the body is understood not as singular or isolated, but as part of a spiritual and relational whole.

Here the figure emerges not as fixed self but as trace, where memory drifts into myth, fragments gather into story, and absence becomes its own inheritance. To acknowledge obscurity is to recognise that imagination endures.