Oude Kerk Come Closer archive session, April 2022. Photo: Maarten Nauw
Megan Hoetger
Megan Hoetger (PhD) is a performance historian, curator, and hard femme. Since 2019 she is a programme curator with the 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.
Hoetger completed her doctoral dissertation at the University of California Berkeley where she carried out an expansive archival project examining the role of filmmakers’ cooperatives in underground performance and media distribution in Cold War Europe from 1963 through 1978. Following her studies, Hoetger held visiting research positions in the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Ghent (2018-19) and in the Archive of the Avant-gardes, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2019) where she respectively undertook research on the film festival form and performances of internationalism in the so-called ‘Eurozone’ during the period of decolonisation, and on reproductive labour in underground film programming across two Germanys.
Alongside her work with If I Can’t Dance and her independent research, Hoetger also moves in several collaborative configurations. As a founding member of the Zone Collective (ZC), she works together with cultural practitioner Kirila Cvetkovska on a variety of projects related to the possibility of solidarity across uneven conditions of access to resources and remembering, including in the 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…; and the workshops Notes from the Table. A Collective Annotation Session and Zoning Play Complex. From 2021–22 ZC participated in the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice programme, and, in 2023, Hoetger works with BAK on an iteration of the Cinema for… series. Elsewhere, as a founding member of the research platform 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). In 2022, Hoetger also curated the Active Archives: Performing Social Realities in Archival Contexts, a performance program focused on archive sociality, for the opening of the Whole Life Congress at the HKW. She has recently given presentations and workshops in the context of the Oude Kerk’s Come Closer series (curated by Radna Rumping) and in the 17th Istanbul Biennial public programme (organized by Zeyno Pekünlü).
