Megan Hoetger is a historian and curator, an exhibition-maker and a pedagogue. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies with specializations in Critical Theory and Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, Hoetger is a curator with the Amsterdam-based arts organization If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution where she works in long-term collaboration with artists and researchers to develop a range of performance productions spanning print media, radio, installation, digital and physical space. Recent projects have been with Derrais Carter, Sands Murray-Wassink, Grant Watson, and collaborative duo Aimée Zito Lema and Becket MWN. Since 2020, she has also worked with If I Can’t Dance archivist Anik Fournier to develop a “Lively Archives” programme, including regular workshops at the School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam and, since 2021, in the « Cultures d’avenir » programme at Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Alongside her work with If I Can’t Dance, Hoetger also moves in several collaborative configurations. As a founding member of Zone Collective, she works together with cultural practitioner Kirila Cvetkovska on a variety of projects including the ongoing participatory research installation Shadow Zones: Experimental Cinema History in Yugoslavia; or, a Cinema and a History Made and Unmade by Maps; the experimental screening program Cinema for Houseboats; and toward a radio play entitled A Neighbourhood Zoning Play. Research for this last project is currently unfolding in the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice programme (2021–22) where Hoetger is a Fellow. Elsewhere, as a founding member of Disco Comradeship, she thinks together with art historian Carlos Kong on the relations between film, urban space, club cultures and political conceptions of comradeship under socialist and post-socialist conditions. From 2021–22 Hoetger and Kong co-lead the workshop ‘Archiving Club Cultures’ at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin resulting in the experimental essay ‘Reassembling East German Nightlife: Scores for Curating from Elusive Archives’ (Archives on Show, HKW) and the public programme ‘Discos, Cinema and Comrades,’ both forthcoming in March 2022.
Megan Hoetger as a mentor
From her interdisciplinary, collaborative, and curatorial experiences, Hoetger is well-attuned to the incredible possibilities and inherent challenges of thinking expansively across aesthetic forms (visual arts, theatre, dance, creative writing, moving image media, and music) and disciplinary interests (art history, architecture, cultural studies, disability studies, decolonial studies, folklore, gender and women’s studies, geography, theatre and dance studies, and urban studies). As a mentor, she thus centres dialogue that helps mentees to articulate their own artistic parameters and working methods, and, in the process, to clarify a framework of presentation contexts for their practices. With this as the pedagogical ground, she supports a wide range of practitioners interested in performance and performance-based research, film and media technologies, archives and archival methods, collective-making, and the politics of knowledge production and transmission. Past mentees projects have focused on handicraft, labour practice traditions, sonic expression, affect and somatics, and the interface of human, non-human and cyborg bodies.