The third issue of Landscapes begins with gathering as a line of inquiry for socially engaged artists.

Gathering

In the first iteration of In Fellowship, we gathered a working group of three artist-led collectives and organizations to reflect on the strategies and challenges of building structures of shared power and collective work: What Would an HIV Doula Do?, a community of people living with and/or impacted by HIV joined in response to the ongoing AIDS crisis; Great Leap, a multicultural arts organization that uses performing arts, cultural practices, and community engagement to empower diverse voices, deepen connections, and transform our relationships to each other and the Earth to create a more just world; and Wild Path Collective, a QTBIPOC-led land stewardship project that is establishing a commons for Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Queer and Trans Folks, and poor and working class people to regenerate soil and our cultures by connecting with rural land. 

Over a year of virtual group calls, cohort members shared insights into the origins and transitions of their groups and the questions they hold. This time was meant to be open and flexible, providing a container for group thought and reflection, a rest from the day to day.

To kick off this year’s issue of 

, we sat down with members of the cohort on the heels of their fellowship to introduce their forthcoming pieces in the issue and reflect on the year shared together—what each member will be taking away from time spent together, what they’ve learned from each other, and how this moment has impacted the ways they are thinking about collective structure.

Conversation participants include Alison De La Cruz from Great Leap; Duaba Unenra and nouf saleh from Wild Path Collective; and Daniel Sanchez-Torres, Michael McFadden, and Theodore (Ted) Kerr from What Would an HIV Doula Do? The call was held in February 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

— A Blade of Grass

How did you approach the contributions you’re including in 

 was a really great opportunity to think about what the stories are that we tell through Great Leap because we’re in a leadership transition period, moving from a founder to a new leader and looking at new possibilities. At the time we were invited we had an intern who had a very different generational take on the work that we do, and it felt like a really exciting opportunity to use this as a reflection period and to have her interview both our founder, Nobuko Miyamoto, and the other two founders of the FandangObon program that we run, Martha Gonzalez and Quetzal Flores. My essay is a reflection as the leader of some ongoing discoveries, moving away from a single founder model and the challenges of doing that. I’m trying to figure out how to name some of the challenges and discoveries in this moment of critical transition for the organization while we’re at this intersection of democracy, representation, equity, justice, and its manifestations impacting diverse demographics that supremacist-led culture doesn’t want to support and witnessing the backlash to it. Part of what’s happened in this last year has been a rediscovery of community and trying to figure out how to gauge what we can say, when we can say it, and how we can say it, while we’re still trying to move forward with our mission.

We’re trying to bring people in at a time when people feel so overwhelmed, when people feel so pressed, when people are managing the siege from ICE and Border Patrol in the cities where many of us are located. We’re seeing how we as culture bearers, artists, culture producers, community gatherers, and healers are deeply impacted. 

 became an opportunity for us to ask what the story is that we want to tell people to help them in this time. Great Leap comes out of these responses, and now more than ever so much of this work is important. What it shows us is that we have to be strategic in a different kind of way than I think we used to in the foundational periods that informed my leadership, which were the ’92 rebellion in LA, 9/11, the housing market crash, and now what we’re witnessing as the rise of presidential authoritarianism inclinations.

You were talking about how this is the moment when we’re all under siege and the people who you’re working with are currently under siege. It’s really distilling why things have been so difficult when I’ve been trying to work with people to make things happen, but also illuminating why I’ve been so frantic in some ways as well. Oh, yeah, because there are all of these very specific targets that are being put on myself and my community, and there’s not a lot that I can do about it except try to keep things going.

 contributions, one group is doing a reflection on grief. One of our members, Alexandra Juhasz, made a documentary on grief, and it spun out into an exhibition and different facilitation groups. Alexandra gave us a bit of backstory and a brief of the documentary that they made, and then each member pulled in documentation of their process through the whole experience.

We have a conversation on the HIV Complexities Project with Gabriel San Emeterio, which I thought was really fascinating from the perspective of adding an additional medical layer of people living with HIV and other things. It also has a layer of the socio-political of all of these things happening in the world that make trying to get care complicated.

Beto Pérez’s piece, “The Cure Is Always in Someone Else’s Hands,” was thinking about the colonial relationship of Mexico and the United States using HIV as a lens to think about the politics and how life has developed under American imperialism. It was quite an interesting piece for me to edit because he originally wrote it in Spanish, and even though he’s translated it, he was very clear that the English was a rough translation and you should go experience the piece in Spanish. It was a negotiation between the two of us about who the audience is and his commitment to trying to speak to his community and from his context. We know that our history has been whitewashed, and that means that we don’t have all of these references that the rest of the world does. I should also say that Beto and I are really close friends, so we talk to each other a lot, and it’s been an interesting jumping off point for conversations around what it means to write and edit for an American audience. How do I want to help the reader get there? Even as events are unfolding—a cartel leader was killed recently in Mexico and it has kind of exploded, and Beto asked me if I had heard about it. I told him what I had heard based on American news, and he was like, whoa, that’s not what happened. So the piece that ended up coming out of it continues to be something that we’re able to talk about and think about and integrate.

The last piece that we’re doing is the Collectivity piece, which was a prompt where we asked all of the WWHIVDD members to think about collectivity. As Ted likes to say, it fed two birds with one scone because we also had to figure out a way to split the funds, and I think this ties into how we make decisions. There was a lot of discussion within the group, and I ended up sending a survey out to everyone and asked them if they wanted a split; if they didn’t want a split, but to put the money back in the pot to split with everyone else; or they didn’t want to split, but they wanted to keep the money in the doula bank account to be used for some future thing.

[An overview of what we’ll find from you in Landscapes, what the process of Landscapes was like for you, etc.]

DeLa, you’d also shared something with us before about the intergenerational nature of the conversations you’re having.


I definitely feel that there have been moments intergenerationally because we work with elders. Our founder, as a toddler, was incarcerated as part of Executive Order 9066. That history in itself really lays a foundation of where the organization is. Multiple folks within our process have been part of social justice movement work. We had a couple moments last year where Gen X people who are facing targeted police surveillance or feeling targeted in their workplaces because of the nature of their work, not even at Great Leap, were discussing having to form an exit plan and figure out if they should go to Mexico or Canada. I think there have been moments with elders where I’ve witnessed the, “Oh yeah, we’ve seen this, so it sucks,” knuckle up, baby boomer generation response of, 

. But also witnessing conversations and the compassion of seeing that that elder’s also trying to manage their own feelings of, 

We’ve been doing a lot more work around preparing for our convening and in talking history and vision, the thing that became clear is our FandangObon practice is very much grounded in social justice movements, because some of the connections that started weren’t just arts and culture connections, but were also progressive movement connections. Part of what I’ve discovered is there is something deeply in the bones of not just Great Leap, but also FandangObon, that is very much rooted in justice movement work.

We have to be loving with each other as we do this work, and I see we sometimes become stand-ins for people’s frustration. They finally get to a place where people will listen to them, and so sometimes they misplace their feelings of trauma and frustration against the supremacist system or anti-immigrant culture and come at us because we’re leading and we’re here. A colleague reminded me like, dude, you’re so open-hearted, you’ll listen. Supremacist institutions are just like, yeah, whatever, so the fact that you’ll listen, they come even harder, because nobody will listen in that structure. And so I think that’s the caring warrior, the caring accomplice, both C-A-R-I-N-G and C-A-R-R-Y-I-N-G, as I’m saying those words. The poet in me is feeling that moment. The caring person is the first filter for people’s trauma responses or frustration. The varying reactions to the thing that’s hurting them.

For me, recently, part of what I’ve been trying to unpack is as a queer woman of color non-binary leader, there are times when I realize, oh, I’m just a punching bag because you’ve never been listened to before. It’s taken me a while to understand these moments in my career as a community-based person who facilitates, who listens, who’s reflexive. Trying to hold compassion for people, but then also realizing as a soft-hearted person or a tender queer, as a leader who listens and is reflexive, how do I become comfortable with a boundary that allows me to be as open as possible but also, for survival, have a wall.

This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move. There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together. That part of doing it together is also us having to work through all of the things that make us inhale and exhale deeply and that are challenging. If I want to be in community with you, I have to figure out how we can be in community when we’re also trying to survive capitalism and the suppression that is coming. Words that we use to describe ourselves or our communities are being taken down and we’re witnessing a layer of language erasure as a means to erase us all.


You were talking about being the caring and the carrying person in trying to facilitate work forward, and how you develop that boundary. A friend of mine and I have a joke of, listen, we can’t have a meltdown on the same day. We have to switch off or else we’re not gonna make this happen. I’m not gonna text my friend today because they just unloaded on me, but tomorrow is my day.

[Thoughts on intergenerationality or response to DeLa]


Is there anything you’d like to add about how your group makes decisions around responding to opportunities and participating in things?


Daniel’s hard work over the last, I think, six weeks is a good example of how through A Blade of Grass and this fellowship, without naming it, we’ve started to actually work on our leadership transition. There is no doubt in my mind that had this project launched a year ago, whether I could have or had the capacity or not, I would have been steering it. Everything in our group changed so that we could have some really real and beautiful conversations, and so that the opportunities, responsibility, workload, and capacities could be more discussed or changed. Watching Daniel do this hard work shows how the work is so fundamentally different based on who’s steering the ship. I think that the change in how work gets done has been meaningful, and then that changes the work we have going forward.

And what this leads me to think about is how I’m excited to think about how we may still be a collective in the future, but are we actually an ecosystem full of these little collectives or little pairs? Maybe this idea of a collective has outlived its function for us, and we need to find new language to talk about who and how we are together.


Yeah, I definitely resonate on the way the collective is led. Depending on who the leader is impacts the relational practice. Great Leap, we feel like we’re a circle of many circles, we’re an ensemble of many ensembles. I feel like lots of the people we work with, myself included, can sometimes be ensembles of one. We’re seeing it show up in some of our ethnic and racial organizing, having a Japanese American lead organizer or lead artist. That’s where a lot of our base is, and so there have been moments where I’ve had challenges where I feel like people are like, oh, we don’t need other Filipinos here, because you guys are part of Little Tokyo. Well, I still want to do the dance that my community does when we show up to a circle. If I’m helping to lead a circle, eventually, it’s important to me that we get to do something from the Philippines. Yes, I’m in deep community with Japanese American practice and I can do a lot of the cultural protocol, but there still comes a point where as an ally and an accomplice, I need to feel reflected and I need to hear my language. I need to dance in our rhythm. I need to hear our music.

I hear these resonances around the places where our identities and our paths create bridges and opportunities and open pathways for people. How can collective help us make sure that we’re covering everybody? Who are we authentically? How do we manage the complexity of the diverse communities that are engaged in our practices and, at times, their competing narratives or desires or needs? It reminds me that part of my practice is not just blanket generosity, but it also has to be founded in this place of, what does this community that I say I want to uplift authentically say that they need? And how do I help facilitate or manifest that and get out of the way of it?

I also really appreciate the way that my mind has exploded in great ways thinking about what it means to have a collective so big and not all in the same place. I do so many place-based things that I also am appreciating the opportunity to be invited to think more broadly about community, and how to positively use digital community for people. Seeing the way that you all digitally organize, and the way that you digitally flow with each other. And so how do we honor the adaptation of analog to digital?


If Great Leap is an ensemble of ensembles, then I think What Would an HIV Doula Do? is a process of processes, and that really speaks to what you so generously witnessed of us, so thank you.


So then is Wild Path Collective a nature of natures?

[Response to decision-making q and invitation to respond to above question from DeLa]


Something that Wild Path Collective offered our shared group as part of their collective work is the idea of composting, and I remember that resonating. I wonder if you each would take us back to thoughts about compost in this work and at this time.


The conversation that we had as a group about composting was really powerful for me and has stuck with me quite a bit. I think there are some parallels between what you have shared from an HIV movement perspective, where there’s a lot of historical stuff that has gone down that has been really problematic and challenging and hard. Being able to pull from and learn from those lessons historically and try to make good out of them is the fertile ground with which we are currently in. The current time that we’re in is also incredibly problematic and challenging, which is what you had shared, too, about describing the current political landscape, and even what it means to be in relationship with each other. It’s both being able to learn, look back, and pull those lessons to be in communion with each other in a way that allows us to think through and process things differently, and to know that whatever we’re doing now becomes the foundation for the future.

We’ve been having conversations about needing to imagine a future. By coming together as these collective groups and taking space and even, DeLa, what you shared was really important from a somatic perspective—you are dancing, you are using ritual, you are using music, you are getting people into their bodies—which is both a way of grounding, but also a way of remembering. There are things that are stored in our bodies that we can’t think our way out of, and there are ways of knowing that are different than just our frontal lobe. Being able to access some of that is really powerful from a somatic perspective.

One of the things that Wild Path Collective was really generous about and comes up a lot for me is thinking about conflict and how we deal with, show up for, approach conflict in a collective in ways that may be different than what we have inherited, learned, are taught. From a decision-making perspective, as simple a thing as how we are dividing up payment. There are lightning rods or triggers that we represent that compound the ways in which we’re interacting with each other. What are the things that we represent, and how can we honor that and process that together? The composting analogy, I think, is a really powerful one, and it’s been really important in our year together. One of the things that we’ve been thinking about as the doulas is wondering where we go from here. We are taking some time to think about the impact of this fellowship and the conversations that we’ve been having and not just move on to our next projects, but to really pause and think and use the fertilizer from this past year to make sure that the ways in which we’re moving forward are the most fruitful or intentional.


Yeah, that’s super resonant. Part of what I appreciated in hearing about the Wild Path story was the metaphorical composting of helping this white family with good justice intentions shift their understanding of what good justice work or gifting looked like and to be able to break it down even more. What are we breaking down? What is helpful to pass on in terms of nutrients? Depending on how you compost, time is an important part of composting and stillness is an important part of composting. And in these moments, I realized that’s part of what last year was, too—trying to figure out the moments when we were frozen in fear and when we were trying to be quiet and still and figure out what was happening. Figuring out how much more waste was going to be dumped on us. Even to discover—which is often the power of composting—the thing that’s been buried the longest, the surprises that are possible when you actually sit still and let an intentional process happen. And in this moment, I want to distill some information to the next generation of people in my legacy line to really explain the cyclical nature of supremacist culture backlash.

There’s a Japanese composting methodology called bokashi, and when I was working on that project it was interesting to be able to say to people that they could actually put meat in there. So just trying to honor our different or cultural approaches to composting, the different microbes that each of our composting practices offer. In composting, even the stuff you try to bury deep down, at some point, somebody’s gonna take the pitchfork and pull it up to the top, because they have to rotate. And so, in that process, who am I? Am I the pitchfork person? Am I the person who’s been dumping all my waste? And ancient wisdom. As much as we try to speed ahead with AI, the more I feel like we’re coming back to the wisdom that I know to be true. Queer people were shamans, gender non-binary people existed. We come from tribes of people that had solutions for some of what we’re experiencing, and because supremacy culture erased it from our composting practices, we’re now in a crisis.


I’m thinking in the context of how long I’ve been part of the group, where it did feel like for the first couple years I was just just sitting in the room, listening to everybody, and now am in this position where I feel comfortable asking a very uncomfortable money question to some of these people 

 I’ve spent that time with them. I feel comfortable facilitating towards a decision that feels correct for the person, not necessarily for me. There were some people who felt like they didn’t deserve the money because they weren’t as involved as other people, and so it was just having this conversation with them that felt like I was pulling from my experience of being part of the group for as long as I have. Look, I’ve seen many iterations of this group, and in all of those iterations, there have been moments when somebody was doing a lot and there have been moments when somebody wasn’t doing anything, but it ends up all balancing out. It felt like it enriched the whole experience of being with the group for so long because I’ve had this understanding of how it ebbs and flows over time.

But I also think that in terms of composting, there were a lot of ideas, and what I love about what we’ve done as a group is that none of the ideas of any of the pieces that we’re presenting feels like it was an original idea. And that’s not shade. We feel like we’ve had a thousand versions of this conversation about this particular topic, but this was the moment that we could finally put into a shape that made sense. A lot of the things that are in the piece I feel like existed six years ago in some of our earlier conversations, so it didn’t feel foreign, it just felt like it was different moments of maturation that felt really nice.


How do we place financial value on contribution? Particularly when it comes to being in collective, and, Daniel, you mentioned this too, that there was no original idea, right? Because we are in community and in this collective approach, maybe there was a spark, but then it got molded and meshed together and morphed into something else. Who’s to say that somebody who contributes one sentence deserves more than somebody who contributes three paragraphs? And I’ll use myself as an example. I could sit and listen to DeLa talk all day long, because the things that come out of your mouth are incredible, and I learn and I get chills. It takes me three hundred words to say something that you say so succinctly in a couple, and I’m getting choked up because, true story, I feel very lucky and grateful to have spent this year with you. It’s been such a valuable year in a really tough year.

The doulas went through a fucking process around the money which I never would have wanted to have done any differently. I thought it was super valuable. We really didn’t want folks to have to out themselves of needing money and have to request it. We tried to respect that the doulas have existed before. They’re existing in this current project. They will exist in the future, and those contributions are valuable, regardless of whether you’re showing up in that moment. There was this other really tricky component that the doulas have done this work primarily without funding for most of its existence, and there have been little pockets of money for different projects for an installation or for photocopies or to make a sticker, but to my knowledge we’ve never never had a big chunk of money, and we jokingly, but also very realistically, talked about what would an HIV doula do without money because the money was getting in the way of us being able to even connect, be with each other, work, and feel like our focus was on things that were important. Just a really interesting overlap of capitalism onto collective work and really fascinating to be a part of the experience and think about, particularly as it relates to some other collectives that each of us are a part of.


I want to avoid saying that it was the perfect solution from the perspective that sometimes when collectives have to make decisions it’s not about making everyone happy, it’s just about, well, this is the one that’s gonna make the least amount of people upset. I have this real aversion to saying that the process needs to be enjoyable. Sometimes the work is the work, and the work is just annoying. From a project management perspective, where this was really one of the first projects where I had to have a real intimate conversation with everybody about how to split the money, it was not as bad as I thought it would be. But I do think it was because it came out of these growing pains and that we did have this process and that we’d done this before.


To close out, is there anything else you’d like to share that you’re taking away from your time In Fellowship with the cohort?


DeLa, your vulnerability is something that I will always cherish. It is a seed that you planted deep inside of my psyche, and I think it did impact my relationship to the collective. It helped me see the ways in which vulnerability already exists within our group and honor that and witness it, and then also remember that if the person doing most of the talking and most of the emailing is also being vulnerable, then that is going to have lots of beautiful rippling effects.


Being a part of the pilot cohort was a very important part of last year for Great Leap. It gave me an additional internal litmus test and collective to bounce ideas off of because of the shift in our ensemble with having Dan join us early on and then after medical things Dan and I made choices together about his participation.

I feel like the doulas have helped to lovingly open my mind to the way in which some of what we’re trying to do is possible. Sometimes in Great Leap, and because I come out of this training, there are certain protocols you have to follow if you’re within a cultural or traditional folk practice. So it was really helpful to realize that you can also engage people in this new way that helps to expand protocol and creates a protocol for when we’re an ensemble of ensembles, or a collective of collectives or a circle of circles, which is how I think of Great Leap a lot.

Because we came from a model of one person holding the torch, it’s been really awesome to witness another model and be in community with you all. With Wild Path, witnessing the real struggle of seeing their progression from x number of people to five people, and knowing that sometimes in this work it goes small and it takes a group of people to carry it forward until it can go bigger or you can connect to the next group of people. I think in this moment, as I try to find more people to be with us, I’m trying to figure out what the ask is, because so many people are so inundated. At any given moment people are having to survive whatever the new trigger or issue is, and so people’s capacity is different. I’m grateful for the divine timing that in a year where things went the way they went this was a really helpful opportunity to show up in a digital space with folks. To be able to show up and be around other people who care about not being isolated, not in a hierarchy. We jump in circles because leadership can change in a circle, but there’s not a hierarchy in a circle, and so part of what this fellowship opportunity and these conversations have offered is a deep affirmation that there are so many ways that we are building together.

Part of what I’ve discovered is I’m always in training, because anytime I’m in a group, anytime I’m in a collective as a lifelong learner it’s an opportunity to learn and witness leadership. I’ve been thinking a lot about what my 21-year-old leader self would have to say to my 51-year-old leader self right now. There’s a lot of judgment and anger, but there’s also a lot of compassion and discovery. Now I understand some of the leaders that I had judgment about, now I get it. I get why you were tired, and you weren’t even dealing with ICE raids. They hadn’t even revoked Roe vs. Wade. They weren’t assaulting trans rights and trying to police bathrooms. We’re continuing to be a part of the generation who grew up with AIDS and HIV awareness, and what that life experience is like, being in community and family folks. I have a lot of gratitude in this time right now. What is the wisdom we can give that isn’t about a foundation dollar, but trying to make sure when I’m in community with people, when I’m in leadership with people, I’m accountable, I’m vulnerable, I’m receptive, and I’m proactive with where we want to go.

[Response to something you’re taking away from the cohort / another cohort member from your time In Fellowship.]


I include A Blade of Grass as a collective as well, given that you’re a collective in a different format but still a collective, and thinking about size, numbers, physical location, and proximity—to be able to spend the year thinking through some of the elements of collectives and what makes them strong, work well, effective. What are some of the challenges that come up? This goes to the idea of circles of circles and even collectives of one. I’m in these meetings as a representative of the doulas, but I’m also in other spaces as a member of different collectives and as an employee and in my relationships. My family is a collective. And so these conversations have benefited me in a lot of other spaces, and I think about the ripple effect that this fellowship, these conversations, this money has had in terms of really being able to have a wider impact beyond my time with the doulas. It’s impacted my work at The Center. It’s impacted my work in a photo collective that I’m in. It’s impacted my work with my relationships and my family. So again, really grateful to be able to think through some of these things throughout the year.

This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move. There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together. 

A Process of Processes

The following text was compiled by a small group of doulas engaged in a kind of grief work over the past year that included Ben Evans, Alexandra Juhasz, Michael McFadden, Molly Pearson, Andrew Suggs, and me. This work was rooted in activating and responding to Alexandra Juhasz’s documentary film 

 and its companion archival installation, 

, presented in both New York and Los Angeles in the fall of 2025. 

is an experimental documentary engaging with decades of DIY activist media, two death bed/legacy videos, and the wisdom of many living “AIDS workers,” as they all sit together in one (changing) format, video—VHS, Hi8, digital, Zoom—to address these and other questions:

How do neighborhoods, sweaters and scarves, videotapes, and queer bars hold ghosts?

TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/1051666644?fl=pl&fe=vl

This unabashedly DIY video holds Juhasz’s images of: Jim (James Robert Lamb, 1963–1998), a gay white male go-go dancer who died painfully at 29 before there were meds in 1993; Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski (1957–2022), 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; Alex, queer feminist caught with them on tape at 29 and 59; fellow AIDS workers Ted Kerr, Marty Fink, Pato Hebert, and Jih-Fei Cheng, and the current owners of the Lower East Side’s legendary queer bar, the Parkside Lounge; as well as streets, hospitals, and apartments of New York, then and now.

After watching and discussing the video several times, we collectively devised two generative public “political grief” workshops focused on naming, holding, and sharing our own grief honestly and communally. While planning those workshops across many online meetings throughout the year, we kept a shared document that included notes, chat text logs, process-based thinking, comment-bubble-annotated runs of show, and tangential observations, among other things.



To create this piece, we decided we would each reflect on the process of processing grief—which we did both during the planning stages with each other and more publicly during the workshops. We also decided that we would cite our working document in these new reflections, which you will find as footnotes throughout. Our intention in composing this text was two-pronged: first, to engage once more in the act of doulaing ourselves, and second, to offer a tangible sense of what that can look like—not just for us, but for any group who continues to choose the work, the process, and each other.

Before you read on, we invite you to watch 

, the death bed/legacy videos of Jim and Juanita, or the conversations between Juhasz and fellow AIDS workers, or to engage with the myriad digital holdings of AIDS memory and response available on the Please Hold website.

 By doing so, you become part of an enduring web of community that together holds grief and hope in light of HIV/AIDS and other assaults; by doing so, you touch and consider how digital traces can (and can not) contribute to communal memory and connection.

– C. (Constantine Jones) with edits by Andrew Suggs


Alexandra Juhasz: Doulaing Ourselves to Doula Others

In the fall of 2025, I transformed my experimental documentary video 

 (2025, 70 mins) into an art installation, 

, that ran contemporaneously in two queer archival spaces: the Pat Parker/Vito Russo Library at New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Community Center,

 and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Centered around grief and the “technologies of memory” that hold and also release or change it, these interrelated iterations work best in community and via facilitated conversation. The video and the installation suggest that grief changes over time, in relation to what and who holds it, and how: materially (in a sweater, on a city street, in a videotape or letter) and as a matter of process (whether walking, reading, or “sharing the load”). The two iterations of the work, as an art installation situated in archives, consider how Zoom and other pandemic technologies, composite onto screens, but also into rooms, flattening or deepening attention, connection, and care.

My documentary and installation are material renderings (in video, in a room, on many Zoom screens) of a commitment to share the grief—and the living/loving possibilities allowed by HIV/AIDS—with other “AIDS workers” because that is something I believe in and need. With a commitment to making more of this, I organized six programs with my institutional sponsors with the holdings in the installation as means to generate more conversations about holding, archiving, and making good use of memories and lived engagements with HIV. One of these was the Political Grief workshop (held once in person at ONE Archives in Los Angeles on October 4, 2025, and once on Zoom, November 9, 2025), run by the AIDS collective of which I am a member, What Would an HIV Doula Do?. We practiced holding grief in Zooms and rooms as part of a building process of naming, looking at, and sharing this ominous, changing, and often private burden in community, first during COVID lockdown, and later as we organized these workshops.

When we held the two Political Grief workshops, participants engaged deeply with other people, their own losses, and with some of my collected materials. They were invited to look at the installation at the ONE archives, or at holding online on my website, which is itself a deep archive of resources about HIV/AIDS. The doulas presented our Los Angeles workshop via a carefully orchestrated hybrid playbook: half in the archive, half participating on Zoom. At the online workshop, we were all in our private boxes, an already familiar territory, given that we had all met and deepened our connections online during COVID lockdown; to this day, some have never met in person. As we continue to plan collective gatherings for our widely distributed network (some with Blade of Grass funding), we also honor the affordances of the in-person, hybrid, and online as distinct, if connected, modes of care and access first refined in lockdown and still needed by some of our members.

People in the room in Los Angeles were moved when they understood that they were allowed and encouraged to touch and read my trove of letters from Jim—held by me for decades in a plastic flower bag—now available to all in an open and accessible archival box sitting on a desk in the gallery. The letters were soft with age and yet youthful in their romantic flourishes.

I chose to hang Jim’s flower bag on the wall outside the gallery with some of his letters in a vitrine below and his blue Armani sweater to its side (much discussed in 

), a strange and simple invitation to enter. People online could explore, but not touch, the many digitized materials on the pleaseholdvideo.com site, including watching the “legacy” videos of Jim and Juanita from which I had been compelled to construct 

. By requesting my collaboration on these death bed videos, each had asked me to carry forward their words and work. Like grief, this responsibility has no end. When I share their videos, my friends linger, and new opportunities for understanding and connection are drawn. In his legacy work, 

, you can hear Jim discuss the flower bag in his own inimitable way.

What was most resonant for me about our workshops was how our process as a collective—doulaing ourselves to doula others with a commitment to hold and make space due to the transitions that occur because of HIV/AIDS—underwrote everything. Through months of meetings, we came to understand the presence, tones, rhymes, rhythms, ongoingness, and power of grief by sharing about our own, thereby allowing for us to name three of its strands: 

. We came to a realization that life under Trump is organized by so much grief, and so many different griefs, that to doula in this period meant little more than opening and shaping spaces to feel, name, share, and together hold its awesome weight. Our workshops held space with a gentle and palpable coherence because we had taken time to develop a language, process, and strength first in dialogue together.

The critical things I learned about grief from our meetings and the workshops are:

It is always reasonable, and often needed, to offer space to others to help them hold their grief.

Grief can be constituted through a variety of co-inflecting losses and can be expressed in infinite registers, formats, places, and affects.

Sharing and holding grief’s burdens is central to organizing, care, and hope.

Making time and space to unearth, encounter, witness, and express grief is valuable and sustaining, especially under fascism (which is built around violent loss).

What does it mean to grieve for what is yet to come? … When does grief begin?

, please add reflections about your own grief to what you have noted and gathered from the exhibition. …Evaluate your notes and ideas to determine which of the three registers of grief are evident to you: personal, political, and anticipatory. This could be all three, or only one.

The “notes” referred to above were notes taken by workshop participants during the Grief Workshops.

At the time of this prompt, their notes already included reflections from spending time with either the installation at the ONE Archives in LA or the website for Alex’s video/installation 

, which deals specifically with how contemporary technologies of memory impact our understanding of and relationship(s) with(in) the ongoing AIDS crisis, “flattening and deepening attention, connection, and care.”

My notes here reflect and mirror that process, and serve as another layer of process in which I doula myself and was doulaed by my friends and cofacilitaors—my grief, my loss, my HIV diagnosis—as I review the archive of our workshop planning.

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?

, Jim and Juanita] were both very ALIVE to me. I know we all kind of know this, but this ghost thing....the ghosts who help us, hold us, heal us…


As I write this, I am sitting in my partner Victor’s brother’s home on Long Island. Victor is a long-term AIDS survivor. He was there in the early 1980s, at ground zero, the Lower East Side of New York City, throwing club nights with budding performance artists who are now household names among my circles of friends, mostly arts professionals and artists, but I think more often of the many others who he watched die—fearing he would at any moment—whose names, performances, and promise are forgotten.

We are here to catch a flight at Laguardia in the early morning. We will be attending my stepmother’s funeral in Tennessee. She was 57. Her death at an early age had more to do with drugs than AIDS, but how important is the differentiation, really? I worry about my father. His grief and loneliness. When older folks lose their partners, they often die soon after. At least I think I heard a statistic about this once. What about those whose partners died at 20? At 36? I think of the toll AIDS continues to take on his/Victor’s generation.

It’s cold in this spare bedroom where I am typing, so I have wrapped myself in a large, fuzzy leopard print scarf. At one end, in a subtle tan ink, the Everlast boxing gear logo is printed. The juxtaposition of this flashy print and macho logo makes me think the scarf is handmade. It was a hand-me-down of sorts from Victor’s ex, Ian. I never met Ian. He died in his early 30s from a drug overdose. He was HIV positive. Victor’s grief from Ian’s loss was fresh when we first met. He handed me a contractor’s garbage bag full of Ian’s clothes and asked me to keep what I wanted and give the rest away. He couldn’t bear to go through them himself. I learned a lot about Ian through that bag/archive. He liked to buy and alter thrift store clothes and had a great sense of style. Although he was both taller and slimmer than I am, each piece of clothing fit me well.

I found a piece of his artwork among the clothes, the interior sleeve of a Kevlar bullet-proof vest he had silkscreened with corporate logos. He was an artist. Now I’m crying about a boy I never met. That’s nothing new, though.

My daily HIV pills that keep my virus at bay, supplied from drug corporations via Medicaid, are my bullet-proof vest. Victor was a very active member of ACT UP New York in those early years of AIDS. He fought for me to have these pills, helping organize demonstrations in both the streets of New York and the FDA headquarters. Now, as someone whose academic and professional work is centered on art and AIDS, I encounter Victor’s traces in the archive often in my research. Those traces also encircle and infuse my everyday life.

Everyone is available to be so loved when you find them in the archive

When we began planning this workshop, Alex introduced the term “anticipatory grief” and I felt seen and heard. I could now put a name to this feeling I had as a child growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s in rural Tennessee. I didn’t know a single out queer person then, but I was watching men dying on television and sensing I was like them. Knowing I would die that way, with those lesions all over me. I had mixed up death and sex. I was already grieving my own demise, prefigured by my budding queer hormonal urges. Deleuze says “there is no revolution without libidinal investment.”

Inheriting a virus & a politics = to also inherit a grief & responsibility to steward that grief

.

When I was diagnosed with HIV in 2008, my expansive grief stretched in directions larger than me, to times and places I had never been. I knew, as my doctor explained, that “HIV was no longer a death sentence.” I came to disagree with his second statement that those diagnosed with HIV “go on to live pretty normal lives.” In the wake of my diagnosis I was not only grieving my own situation, I was grieving the millions of lives lost before me to this virus, the impact that had yet to come for me, and for those not born yet whose lives would be shaped by the virus. I had become part of an intergenerational lineage that includes folks dead, living, and unborn.

Sara Marcus has written about this beautifully in her book 

 (2023), where she describes “listening for the dead and being in coalition with one's ancestors, and assembling a lineage to which you can hold yourself accountable."



Let this be a shared ritual that will eventually leave traces for others.

12:49:26 From Ben Evans to Everyone:
Yes, I am thinking about how stewarding ties to future…what does it mean to grieve for what is to come? (There was a sense back in November, for example, of a coming grief but we hadn’t experienced it yet — and now we are, and will continue to…in terms of political grief).

Andrew:

12:50:00 From Molly Pearson to Everyone:
Anticipatory grief—something people who are dying of terminal illness (of all kinds), and those who love them, know a lot about.

12:51:22 From Andrew to Everyone:
“Anxiety because one has no more time to live and to die, because one no longer lives and has not yet died, because one has died already and nevertheless lives on, because life and death merge beyond recognition; anger because one cannot prepare in one’s lifetime for the time of dying, because one has been betrayed and cheated not only out of one’s life but also out of one’s death, because one imagines oneself to be the victim of a life and a death that alternately occupy each other’s position whenever one tries to grasp them, whenever one tries to orient oneself by means of their unavailable and nevertheless appointed time.” 

—Alexander Garcia Düttmann, “Dying Before One’s Time” in 

At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus

❤️

I also brought some personal grief to the workshop. My mother died in 2020 and I learned just before that she was a long-term HIV survivor, living in tightly kept secrecy about her illness in Appalachian Tennessee since 1990. Thirty years of hiding, even from me. When I found out, I had been hiding my own HIV serostatus from her for 12 years. I thought it would be more than she could bear. After all, I was living a “pretty normal life.”



What emerges: “not aloneness” (we don’t have to hold it alone).
Feel free to write some notes and ideas about this.
Okay, back to watering plants.

Which kind of grief do you want to participate in?

 This was a question that emerged from our workshop planning, and though it was actually a pragmatic and organizational tool, I feel struck by it in a new way, today. At which point does grief become participatory, and at which point do we have so much to choose from that our participation is inspired through choice—or in this case, desire?

, near the end, when Marty’s voice fades in, speaking about the idea of inheriting—through shared, intergenerational memory—a kind of grief. I chose this clip from the film as a way to frame my own reflections about grief in the workshops because it reminded me of something I’ve thought about a lot in my own relationship to living with HIV, which is a notion that, at the moment of my seroconversion, I not only inherited an illness—I inherited a politics. So, in joining Marty’s voice and open questions around what gets inherited, I ask: what does it mean for a life when memorial, grief, and politics are already baked in?

In this way, the collective grief that is endlessly braided over time, through generations, begs to be healed somehow—or at least that’s been my understanding of intergenerational trauma. Yet, in the context of Alex’s film, and in the context of the workshop this group of us designed and facilitated, I now wonder (and feel deeply) that healing is quite possibly not the point, nor the goal. The choice becomes to live with grief, in all its threads and registers: the braiding of political, personal, and anticipatory—the grief we know is coming. What are the costs of not choosing to live with grief? I think somehow, through this workshop, this small group of us learned what it means to not only identify 

which kind of grief we want to participate in

, but also what it means to invite others to make that same choice. If grief is a given, how might we desire which version of it we want to experience?

C. (Constantine Jones): Big Hole, Please Hold

I am going back to visit my grief now, in order to write this. I mean that statement literally, spatially, and sincerely. It isn’t far—just there, in my chest, behind my eyes, in my home. Grief planted itself in the center of my room—a big yawning colorless hole right in the middle of the floor; no remarkable qualities to note except the usual persistent possibility of falling back in or else, when trying to get out from under my present, I might stop a while to sit hanging my legs over the edge and staring down so long the days go by tick tick too soon. But I’ll go back there now—like I said it’s not far. I’ll go with my wicker basket and I’ll lower it down to draw something up for us here.

In a digital archive, now floating in some cloud (which is really just a bunch of chips and wires in a metal box somewhere out under the big sky of the country), I once contributed the following text:

I remember always having this photo, but not where or when it was taken. It is good to see us smiling & it hurts to see us like that too. I remember that little crack in her voice whenever it would go up in excitement when she spoke to me. I think it was the goodness breaking out to touch whoever it could. That’s just how she was. I remember a hundred small things she would tell me & imagine what she would tell me today. I remember her phone number. I never saved her in my contacts because dialing that number was part of the ritual. I remember softness. I look at this picture every day & because I look at it I remember softness & I try to be soft. I try.

On November 9, 2025, somewhere between 5-7 ET / 4-6 CT / 2-3 PT, during the second iteration of WWHIVDD’s Political Grief workshop, I typed that into the body of a shared document where others were also typing things simultaneously, giving their own grief a shape. I did not write this text that night though; I copied it from a handwritten journal entry dated September 19, 2025, during a workshop about archives I attended for work, in which I was a participant rather than facilitator. Today, January 15, 2026, I paste it again here. This is now the third time that this particular grief has taken shape in this particular arrangement of letters and words and sentences; each occasion, its own context; each remembering, its own revisitation of that big hole in my room.

The picture I’m describing in that passage is one of me as a child sitting on my Yiayia’s knee at some family member’s wedding or other. I can look up from where I am typing right now and see it resting on the bookshelf at eye level, both of us smiling out from the past into the future, which has since become my present now and also, again because of the big hole, my past too.

In the run-of-show for our second workshop, item number 4 under the bolded heading “

Each of the doulas responds to the clip or the video more broadly: this frames what happens next.

A simple enough line which itself contains a note from Ben made through the comment function in Google Docs: 

we're acknowledging that this part should really be kept short/introductory/contextual so we can get to the workshop-y part.

In revisiting our process now, I’m again feeling the weight of many different times clanging around like raw ore in a bucket. During our first workshop, on October 4, 2025, my short/introductory/contextual story was about grieving my Yiayia, who passed away in Alabama in 2015, a month after I moved to New York from Tennessee. During the second workshop, a different grief was singing and so I instead recalled an action I had taken part of in December of 2024 in protest of the (ongoing) genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli State, which itself had already been going on for a year by then (or 75 years, if we’re calculating truthfully)—and this grief was not so much the grief of feeling the action was futile but of feeling the profound and irreversible loss of so many possible futures; of the Palestinian lives whose remaining time was decided for them by an occupying power and also for the land itself, whose stewardship we have utterly rejected, abandoned, refused. And all of this was meant, to quote our run-of-show, to frame “what happens next.”

This, I think, is where I hoped to land together—at that simple and impossible question: what happens next? Truthfully it is hard to find the 

 are always intruding, drawing me back to that hole in my floor. I have tried to stop it up, the hole, but it seems to go down forever. I have tried to cover it, but nothing is big enough. And so finally I have decided the only way to manage that hole is to rearrange the furniture around it; to try to get used to it being there; to tend to it, even, if necessary. Now the task is not to barrel through every moment ignoring that big hole in my chest, but instead to reckon with the fact that, because it is very large and very deep and full of so much and so much else, it more often than not will take me a bit more time to navigate the rim and move towards all those possible futures still waiting for us to decide on them. There is no shortcut across the hole, and if I falter along the way, so be it. But I am on my way, and rather than meet you there I wonder if we could go together.

This past year, 2025, has been …a doozy.

It has been filled with so much turmoil, upheaval, dismantling, and sorrow. For me and in my life, I have found that the “shock and awe” tactics of the government have been “effective.”

Each day, I would wake up to more and more loss, to more and more lost…

without ever fully processing or grieving the impact of the previous day.

I mean, I don’t mean to sound melodramatic.

“I’m fine, it’s fine, everything’s fine.”

when I try to inhale and take something more than a quick, shallow breath,

when I try to escape my lizard brain to the parts that can embrace complexity,

I am flooded with a deep and profound sense of “not-okay-ness.”

I work within the HIV and LGBTQ health field. I have a deep sense of pride and gratitude to get to do this work. I also feel a deep sense of obligation to those who have come before me. These services, these organizations, this field were all built out of dire necessity. Everything we have now was “fought for.” I carry an immense sense of responsibility to both be a protector and steward of this legacy. I carry an immense sense of responsibility to ensure that our community has the responsive resources needed for both today and beyond. So each day, when I wake up and find the next attempt to discredit, dismantle, and dishonor their work, our work, I am met with intense feelings of grief:

, I am struck (...well, by so many things) … by the enormity of “the holding”:

What was most resonant for me about our workshops was how our process as a collective—doulaing ourselves to doula others with a commitment to hold and make space due to the transitions that occur because of HIV/AIDS—underwrote everything. Through months of meetings, we came to understand the presence, tones, rhymes, rhythms, ongoingness, and power of grief by sharing about our own, thereby allowing for us to name three of its strands: 