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May 28, 2026Film Quarterly0 citations

Alexandra Juhasz’s Please Hold

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BFBroderick Fox

Key Points

  • This project aims to explore how grief, shaped by queer activism, can foster cultural resilience and resistance.
  • Developed a new video titled Please Hold (2025) and a site-specific installation Holding Patterns (2025–).
  • Engaged audiences through technologies of memory at LGBTQ+ archives and community spaces.
  • Released the video innovatively via pleaseholdvideo.com.
  • The project highlights the intersection of grief and queer history.
  • It invites the community to engage with archival materials and collective memory.
  • The installations offer strategies for resilience in the face of a disconnected technopolitical era.

Abstract

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.

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Cite This Study

Broderick Fox (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a17ddab3fad632b0f9da72fhttps://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2026.79.4.79
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Also Consider

Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context:

  1. 1Performing Solastalgia: Queer Forms of Ecological Care in Contemporary Performance and Relational Art Practice2025
  2. 2Remediated memory, digital witnessing and engagement: A qualitative analysis of the interactive documentary ‘The Space We Hold’2024 · 2 citations
  3. 3Digital Humanities as Memory Work: Memory Eternal as a Virtual Site of Mourning2024
  4. 4Liquid Legacy2026
  5. 5Digital lifelines, COVID-19 memories: Chinese lesbians reflecting on community and care in pandemic times2026