As a mentor, she 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.
From 2022-2023, she led the project Performing Colonial Toxicity, a multi-platformed research project by architectural historian Samia Henni co-produced by Framer Framed and If I Can’t Dance, and also in 2023 she oversaw development and production for the Afro-surrealist short film ZWARTE IBIS by the media collective Black Speaks Backs. Previous curatorial and editorial projects have also included: Black Revelry, spanning a late-night radio show and experimental “album-book” with poet-scholar Derrais Carter; a two-year durational performance of archiving and online database with visual artist Sands Murray-Wassink and cultural producer Radna Rumping entitled Gift Science Archive; the long-term archive activation How We Behave / An Archive of Radical Practice with Grant Watson and Anik Fournier; and the sweeping art historical survey book and research program When Technology Was Female: A History of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917-1989 with Susanne Altmann.
Elsewhere, Hoetger also moves in several collaborative curatorial research configurations. As a founding member of Zone Collective, she works together with cultural practitioner Kirila Cvetkovska on a variety of projects including the 2021 participatory research installation Shadow Zones: Experimental Cinema History in Yugoslavia; or, a Cinema and a History Made and Unmade by Maps, which spanned exhibition, outdoor screening program, and performance-lecture series. From 2021-2022 Zone Collective was fellows in the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice programme where they realised the workshop Zoning Play Complex, and, since then, have begun work towards a new book entitled CINEMA FOR. Elsewhere, as a founding member of Disco Comradeship, Hoetger 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 House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin resulting in the experimental essay ‘Reassembling East German Nightlife: Scores for Curating from Elusive Archives’ for the 2022 glossary Archives on Show, edited by Beatrice van Bismarck. Also in 2022, Hoetger worked with the HKW to realise the program Active Archives, Performing Social Realities in Archival Contexts for the opening of the institution’s exhibition The Whole Live. Archives & Imaginaries.
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.