Jim Hubbard: Nostalgia
Overview
Nostalgia is an experimental film and live musical performance created by legendary activist filmmaker Jim Hubbard (United in Anger: A History of ACT UP) in collaboration with composers Chris Cochrane and Kevin Bud Jones. Commissioned by the New York City AIDS Memorial, the work explores grief, memory, and the persistence of life through a newly created moving-image piece set against a live, original score.
Project Context & Curatorial Role
As Commissioner alongside curator Nick Hallett, I worked with Hubbard, Cochrane, and Jones to realize this intimate performance at the LGBT Community Center, bridging experimental cinema, archival preservation, and live sound.
Hubbard constructed the film by intercutting newly captured footage with materials drawn from his personal 40-year archive. Images of deceased friends appear like apparitions in windows overlooking the changing landscape of the Bronx, while archival shots of Hubbard’s late partner, Roger Jacoby, are juxtaposed with global landscapes—symbolically placing Jacoby in places he was never able to visit in life.
The film abstracts depictions of safe sex to explore its joys, anxieties, and strangeness, using recollections of lost friends to restore an emotional connection to the ongoing grief of the AIDS crisis. The screening was accompanied by a live score performed by Chris Cochrane and Kevin Bud Jones, with percussionist Jim Pugliese, framing the visual archive with dynamic, contemporary sound.
Role: Commissioner, with Nick Hallett, Curator
Date: November 19, 2023
Location: LGBT Community Center, New York, NY
Artists: Jim Hubbard with Chris Cochrane, Kevin Bud Jones, and Jim Pugliese
