Alexandra Juhasz’s Please Hold: Technologies of Memory and Anticipatory Grief by Broderick Fox
Alexandra Juhasz builds upon her decades of participatory media activism in a new video Please Hold (2025) and an associated site-specific installation Holding Patterns (2025–). Inspired by deathbed videos Juhasz made thirty years apart for AIDS activist James Lamb (1993) and artist/organizer Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski (2022), this new transmedia initiative asks: can the capacity to live with and through grief, cultivated by generations of queer activists, offer strategies for broader cultural resilience and resistance? In a technopolitical era that seeks to silo us and disconnect us from history, Juhasz invites viewers/visitors to engage “technologies of memory”—the media, things, spaces, and conversations that archive and transmit queer history, kinship, care, and activism. This article examines the video’s innovative release via pleaseholdvideo.com and two concurrent Fall 2025 iterations of Holding Patterns at LGBTQ+ archives and community spaces in Los Angeles and New York City.
Published in Film Quarterly, 2026
by Broderick Fox
Topics: Activist Media | AIDS | Archives | COVID-19 & Disability Justice | Digital Realist Fragments & Detritus | Documentary | Film & Video Projects | Highlight | Recent Work (2024-25) |