How is research and study a critical component of AIDS activism? How do we learn, remember, and grieve differently on paper, screens, fabrics, and video? How do computers and magazines, sweaters and scarves, videotapes and queer bars hold ghosts?

How do we let them go?

A meditation on technologies of memory, with close attention paid to medium specificity, the installation comprises four hour-long interviews and their paper transcripts—remarkable conversations between friends and “AIDS workers”—two death-bed/legacy videos shot by Alexandra Juhasz on her friends’ request (in the 1990s and 2020s), as well as some of the things and photos shared in the process of remembering, celebrating, and fighting inside queer communities of care.

Audience members are invited to interact with the installation including viewing the legacy videos of Jim Lamb, a gay white male downtown performer who died painfully before there were meds at 29 in 1993 and Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, a Black disabled queer feminist media activist who died in 2022 on her own terms, in her sixties, and due largely to inequities in the American healthcare system and COVID in addition to their cherished effects. 

In Summer 2023, Alexandra Juhasz began production on a personal, DIY video, Please Hold. As research for her archival and legacy project, she shot four interviews with fellow “AIDS workers” on Zoom: Jih-Fei Cheng, Marty Fink, Pato Hebert, and Ted Kerr. She asked them to consider and discuss with her these topics raised:

• AIDS activism and HIV/AIDS; COVID and disability
• The life and legacy of James Robert Lamb and others from that generation (memorial)
• The life and legacy of Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski and others like her
• Video, photography, and the digital as a holder for memory and change
• Things and place as holders of memory and stories

The installation comprises these four hour-long interviews and their paper transcripts—remarkable conversations between friends and AIDS experts—as well as the two death-bed/legacy videos, and some of the things and photos shared in the process.

Installation premier at the Mimesis Documentary Festival, Summer 2024.

Now held in one space, these items build (a) room for recollection, study, comparison, and compassion.

Holding Patterns is available for adaptive, community-based placement wherever memory happens: queer bars; archives, bookstores, libraries; feminist, queer, trans, and other community centers, and so on. It can be placed anywhere that houses books, records, and collections pertaining to AIDS. Reach out and we can figure out how to make the installation work where you live, study, remember, and connect.