book talk “Take ‘Em Down: Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting”

“Do silent rituals not contribute to a sterile understanding of history, in which events are clearly delineated? Remembering is a form of forgetting, because in order to remember, a kind of intelligibility is sought. This demands the past is over and done. What kind of rituals would we follow if commemoration was intended to teach us about incomprehensible chaos?”

“I’m not trying to say that smoke bombs are a better way of commemorating than candles, but I wouldn’t exclude the possibility.”

In a book talk with queer theorist and curator Simon(e) van Saarloos at the underground book shop KIOSK Rotterdam, Hoetger discussed the 2022 English translation of van Saarloos’s provocative Herdenken Herdacht⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠ (Take ‘Em Down⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠ in the English translation). Originally published in Dutch in 2019, the book offers an imaginative queer realignment of vocabularies of time and commemoration, as well as an incisive critique of whiteness and memory politics in the Netherlands. With its unapologetic language and sexy tongue-in-cheek style, Herdenken Herdacht prompted heated - and long overdue - discussions in the Dutch media, catapulting van Saarloos into the national spotlight. Together, Hoetger and van Saarloos discussed this hyper-visibility alongside queer radical politics of invisibility and the entanglements of theory and practice. The conversation was followed by poetry readings from Pelumi Adejumo⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠ and Logan February⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠.