This first monograph from Paraguay Press is dedicated to the work and collaborative method of Éric Baudelaire.

Éric Baudelaire's films are made with those whose stories they tell: revolutionary filmmakers and activists, terrorists, secessionists or teenager, often confronted with the powers of the state and its institutions. Their lives, ethical choices, and relationship to images are exemplary materials for a cinema that questions the forms of documentary film, but are also central to a collective work that Baudelaire has developed over the course of the exhibitions, and which is an integral part of his artistic practice. As an extension of each film (and as in this book), the artist incorporates into her hangings works and archival documents from her exchanges with the protagonists, but also the productions of other artists and filmmakers, and those of a temporary community of guests who come, in public debates, to cast a gaze on the works that is not limited to the field of art.

The same spirit imbues this book. In Make Do With, Erika Balsom and Marcella Lista trace how these two fields of experience-films and exhibitions-are articulated in two texts that are themselves the stages of a long-term exchange between the artist and the two authors. With Marcella Lista, since 2015, and following the exhibition Après that they organized together 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.