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posted on 2025-11-03, 04:38 authored by Alex RoeAlex Roe, Alexandra Juhasz Since the 1990s film scholar, activist and media maker Alexandra Juhasz has been building feminist media community. For Alex, who organised collectives such as Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE), media is a process of political collaboration that can educate, affirm and organise communities. Media as Process is a portrait of the relationship between friends and lifelong collaborators Alex and Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, who were both original members of WAVE. Alex and Juanita share the value of using easily accessible media as an excuse to facilitate political inter-personal relationships, and through this process, foster long-term activist collaborations across race and class. Intercut with excerpts from Alexandra’s and WAVE’s documentaries, the film explores the feminist media methods developed in NYC in the 1990s in collaboratively produced and community-based video about AIDS, feminism, and related concerns. Media as Process foregrounds Alex Martinis Roe’s relational process of coming to know Alex’s archive, documenting the collaboration between the two Alexes as another iteration of feminist media praxis.<p></p>
Funding
Creative Australia;Arts Projects for Individuals;2369204 G-23-369632
History
NTRO Output Category
- Original Creative Work : Visual artwork
Place
New York, USAVenue
La Trobe Art InstituteNTRO Publisher
Transmediale, Berlin & La Trobe Art InstituteMedium
4K video, Beta SP and VHS transferred to digital with soundResearch Statement
This film sits within the fields of contemporary art, feminist media studies, and community video. It investigates Alexandra Juhasz’s long-term practice of building feminist media communities since the 1990s—particularly through collectives such as Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE)—where media-making is a process of political collaboration. The research addresses how dominant media histories privilege singular authorship and distribution over relational collaboration and the media-making as a way of fostering community and extending activist struggle. It explores methods of making media that centre accessibility, interdependence and collaboration across different positionalities.
The work contributes new knowledge by theorising and demonstrating “media as process” as a feminist methodology of cultural production. Through a portrait of the relationship between Juhasz and Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, intercut with 1990s community video and present-day dialogue between Juhasz and Martinis Roe, the film performs a methodology in which inexpensive, accessible tools catalyse committed political relationships. It articulates media-making as pedagogy and organising—an ethics of collaboration that treats filmmaking as activist practice.
The research significance lies in the way its study and articulation of a situated feminist method enables that method to become transversal and learned by others with shared purpose. The work was featured at the leading international critical media art festival Transmediale Berlin (2025) in the main auditorium at Haus der Kulturen der Welt as its world premiere, evidencing strong peer recognition across art and media communities. It was also exhibited as part of a dedicated exhibition for the broader project Storytelling Liberation, staged at one of Australia’s leading university museums, La Trobe Art Institute (2025), and is now part of their permanent collection.Size or Duration of Work
20:27Affiliation
Alex Martinis Roe, University of Melbourne
