Levi van Gelder for Glamcult #143

Levi van Gelder has been in a long-term parasocial relationship with Ötzi the Iceman (that 5,000-year-old glacier-preserved corpse they found in the Alps, remember). Sometime in 2019, he had a thought that could probably kill a Victorian child: What happens when you give an ancient mummy a miniskirt and an insatiable urge to write fanfiction?
While Ötzi provides niche trivia about early humanity, he’s also ​​become a vessel for hegemonic storytelling that often reinforces the patriarchal status quo. To challenge this, Levi’s ongoing dragified mummy project Ötza reanimates the frozen “truth-bearer” of history as a fanfiction-writing, post-human, miniskirt-wearing influencer with a huge thigh gap (Ötza asked to include this). An ancient body: queer-coded. Levi’s practice isn’t about who gets remembered (as Ötzi wasn’t selected by a historian; he was just an unlucky dude whose body was frozen for millennia). Instead, Levi explores how we are remembered and what stories are projected onto historical subjects. Read the full conversation below.

Where did your fascination with Ötzi come from at a time when culture is obsessed with the new? I have been researching (in the artist sense of the word) and working with Ötzi the Iceman since probably 2018. I visited the Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano—where the mummy is exhibited—in 2019. I was incredibly struck by the corpse that was locked in this cooling cell behind a huge metal wall, visible behind a very small window, blurry from condensation. This very uncanny, shimmering corpse was removed so far away from the museum visitor, neutralized almost, while in the rest of the museum, all the details of the life of Ötzi were made into an spectacular museum experience. There was a huge discrepancy between these two realities: the story of Ötzi displaced into archeological paraphernalia and curated museologies and even a lifesize recreation of what the mummy would have looked like, and this corpse, such a tactile remembrance of human history, visible but only voyeuristically, like an ontological peep show.
I cannot really pinpoint why exactly this intense fascination started, but I just was really struck by the many roles this mummy had in society, or even already in this museum. As one of the oldest and best preserved human remains, it has given us much insight into the life of the Neolithic European human. A role that is throughout time really important, because in society we’re always trying to grapple with the “true nature” of the human condition.
The central theme I get back to with Ötzi often tends to be agency, as this corpse lays completely neutralized in isolation, a very unidirectional and patriarchal story extracted from its body and displaced into an immersive museology, while the body remains silent. This state of uninterrupted undeadness is quite tragic, and what I mostly took from visiting the museum was the sadness and silence surrounding this ancient body. My rendering of the mummy is quite the opposite, both to the depiction of Ötzi created by the hegemonic historical project and to the silence of this corpse. Ötza is sort of subverted hyper-contemporary reimagining, all forensic evidence extrapolated into a radically alternative direction. But the scientific, archaeological and museological infrastructures that embed the actual corpse definitely inform my way of working, but I always try to subvert them, and insert them with Ötza’s knack for misinterpretation, and her desire to tell her own story (that borders desperation.)

Long story short; I guess I’m a bit of a history nerd?

Why did you want to reframe Ötzi as a queer figure, and what does that say about who gets remembered, and how?
There’s actually an anecdote that I use a lot: an Australian queer magazine did an April’s Fools joke where they claimed that they found sperm around the rectum of Ötzi, which of course became a huge controversy. I think this example illustrates how important a symbol like Ötzi is, and what it means for the human condition if one of the oldest known humans was a bottom… (Or at least active in the act of sodomy.) At this point of significance to Western society, and with the sort of primitive humanity for which he is a mouthpiece, he clearly also can become an apt vessel for transgression and subversion.

I guess my exploration doesn’t talk as much about who gets remembered (because the answer to this is in Ötzi case fairly simple; whoever takes a wrong turn during a hike in the Italian Alps and gets frozen in ice for 5000 years) but more how we get remembered. How history forces a totalizing narrative on any archaeological or historical subject, which is fed by our prejudices (patriarchal, heteronormative), championed by scientific paradigms and our humanist need to exploit and categorize and extrapolate to an extent that they fit perfectly in our hegemonic understandings of ourselves.

So, yes, how we get remembered, but finally also: in which conditions? What is very important in the drag transformation from Ötzi to Ötza, is the centering of the corpse, the abject posthumous prehistoric body that is kept in a cooling cell unable to decompose, suspended in an eternal never. The reality of this mummy is often overlooked, since its immense age and archaeological importance is the subject of all its study. To the scientific project, Ötzi’s corporeal and physical reality of decay is often a hurdle to overcome: how to keep it from decaying further. But this asks us questions about how to deal with human remains of this age. Does our scientific curiosity supersede the respect we ought to have for this posthumous body? To suspend our judgment of its postmortal fate; subject to endless scientific study, locked in a cooling cell, denied a ritualistic burial? Ötza, in her often quite naive, endearing, almost relatable ways (not quite relatable since most of the audience probably won’t be a cryodesiccated mummy), struggles with these inhumane conditions, and tries to find solutions.

In an age where stories can be simulated ad hoc, a mummy, or any historical artifact, is something that machines can never truly replicate. What does it mean to preserve something in an age of intelligent replication, and what is it that your work resists?
I am quite inspired by the ambivalence of Ötzi, of us speculating and projecting contemporary ideas into what it meant to be a human in copper age Europe. Within the speculation, in between the small bits of scientific data, there’s a lot of potential to imagine a different world than we live in today. However, the prehistoric human often becomes a tool to reinforce the status quo and contemporary patriarchal and colonialist hegemony. So my attempt to rewrite this prehistoric human has always been one to completely tear apart the groundwork that’s been laid by the historical project. And the ambivalence comes from the speculative nature of this mummy, and of the prehistoric human. It takes some of the scientific findings, but then extrapolates it in the complete opposite direction. As Ötza herself is a writer, she also has access to this speculative tool, and through fanfiction writing, she has an unlimited supply of ways to develop her own identity. She can literally be anything.
I like to think of Ötza as a proto-influencer of sorts. Ötzi quite literally has been an influencer since this ancient body influenced so much, in every realm and discipline of human civilization. The way we see ourselves and where we come from are shaped from the findings surrounding this body, next to the fact that new technologies for dating and genetic analysis were developed while researching this body.
All of this influencing is not done with agency, but an influencing extracted from a dead body without consent, a passive influencer. The analogy to the contemporary influencer is then maybe an activation of this influencing, where the active influencership exists on the intersection of also many, but maybe slightly different disciplines. But whatever she writes, or wherever she appears, there is this disruption also present in her appearance, in her morbid ancient corpse-like relic-hood, dressed in contemporary signifiers. Hegemonic disciplines of thought are disciplines of categorization. By just standing there, she disrupts all categories, she resists categorization, by being (potentially) everything.

In the conversation around deepreal vs deepfake, your work complicates the binary. On one hand, you’re ‘preserving’ this mummy’s story, on the other, you’re constructing a fully imagined fanfiction. Is your goal to uncover something lost about Ötzi or to invent something entirely new in her place?
Definitely the latter. I never look to retrieve anything lost, solve any mystery, or provide any legitimate commentary on Ötzi or the life of the Neolithic human. Well, inventing something new might also be a stretch.
I guess what’s important to me is letting people think about the subjectivities in the writing of history. Ötza is an archaeological celebrity, but also an incarcerated scientific subject. My project, as crazy as it is, might be explained as me trying to grant her gifts or tools for self-actualization, reclamation of her story, and liberation. For me, ways of doing this and crafting my own identity was fanfiction, and later I explored gender expression through drag. Even though these are kind of the only tools I can offer Ötzi, I do think they are both powerful tools, subverting powerful structures in our patriarchal capitalist deadlock: gender, identity, ownership, copyright. I like to quote Judith Butler who said that drag reveals the seams in the construction of gender. I kind of propose my way of fanfiction-laced prehistoric drag (that’s a mouthful) as revealing the seams in the construction of historicity.

How do you navigate the ethics of speaking for a historical figure, especially when transforming them so boldly?
I think the project is built with distinct misrepresentation and as one of its cornerstones, which is incredibly important. The way I write or make art in general is by creating a flat horizontal pool of references (whether it’s Lacan or One Direction canon) and I reappropriate these source texts to give voice to Ötza’s thoughts, desires and fears. This is a very counterfactual exercise, in which the liberties I take with Ötzi (the OG natural mummy) are the biggest misinterpretations of all. But these are very deliberate of course, my version of Ötzi is an exaggerated contemporary drag influencer version of the mummy that writes fanfiction and is desperately looking for a sponsorship deal with VOSS. Its subversion is meant to show the seams of gender (as drag does) but also of the way history is written, and scientific fact is constructed, it reconfigures historicity. It is obviously wildly anachronistic and maybe sometimes even slightly disrespectful (I prefer to call it irreverent), but these are tools for disruption of hegemonic narratives.
I guess there’s definitely also dangers. We are living in a time where traditional outposts for truth are quickly crumbling down, and in many disciplines it is essential to safeguard truth. As I speak about Ötzi I also speak about science’s regime of truth, and here it often becomes tricky to get into pseudo-theoretic discourse. But even—and especially—here it is important to disrupt and misrepresent, I think. This is also actually why Ötza went on a double date with the Bogdanoff twins (who were famous academic “scammers” that wrote science papers that were just a nonsensical sequence of scientific jargon about topological field theory), to talk about the possibility of counterfactual speculation within science, because Igor and Grichka maybe were just victims of science’s regime of truth, just like herself.
What I’m trying to say is that art is the place for speculation and radical alternatives, and here I think misinterpretation is an essential component. Writing, making, performing as Ötza becomes a tool to reevaluate the systems that valorize the original body, so speaking “as” Ötza (as idiocratic as it may seem), is always been an exercise in nullifying the pre-existing stories about the mummy as just that: also stories—even if it’s just for a moment, by providing an absurdist alternative.

What role does your studio as a physical space play in shaping Ötza’s world?
The project was created across Coffee Companies, my house and other people’s studios, since I didn’t have a studio at that moment. I had the privilege to be a resident of De Ateliers for the last two years, which really made me understand my practice, and gave me the opportunity to expand on it, since it provides residents with amazing studio spaces. Now I’m still kind of coming down from the high, realizing how unrestricted my practice has been there, and needing to negotiate conditions by myself now. But I found a really nice new studio space, installed my own little (post-hu)man cave, installed Ötza in the utility closet, and now we’re off to new chapters of fanfiction.

Costume and material are all key to Ötza’s becoming. Is there a physical ritual in bringing her to life?
If there is a physical ritual to bring Ötza to life, then I first and foremost need my shaman Leila El Alaoui. Not only did she create the Ötza suit, and does Ötza’s styling, she also was there on the very first moment I spoke this idea into being. I pitched this idea of Ötzi as a fanfiction entrepreneur to her in 2022, and she whipped me into shape to actually bring it to being. Without her, I would have never actualized it. (And lastly; I also need her to physically zip me into the suit.)
Other than that, some vocal exercises (Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, Semantics), a good couple sips of VOSS, and lubricating her lips with some Vaseline so her lips don’t crack during a reading. (Because when she starts yapping, it’s hard to stop her…)

With so much AI-polished content online, have you ever felt pressure to make Ötza more clickable, more shareable? Has the feed ever shaped her story?
Definitely. Especially when seeing that some thing, visuals, content is doing very well among followers and algorithms, it’s sometimes hard to resist the temptation to go into content-creation mode. The character is there, the story is there, so it would be a perfect set of conditions to just start creating content and sending it out there, and I think it would perform well, but that’s why I guess it’s even more important to establish your own momentum as a maker. At the end of the day, even though Ötza kind of presents herself as an influencer or entrepreneur in a pseudo-satirical way, I am an artist. The first step of the process is always collecting source materials, reading, and processing this through writing fanfiction. This needs time, and I am trying to create time for doing this among production, expectations, administrations, you name it. I really enjoy her ambiguous position on the internet, and her actually performing as a micro-influencer contextualizes the project in a way that I can actually engage with people, places and platforms, and provide satire and criticism there. But it’s very important to put up boundaries, because before you know it you actually become merely a cog of these infrastructures, generating clicks and likes, without any of the criticism and complexity. The latter just takes way more time.

Fanfiction has long existed in the margins (queer, amateur, and unauthorized). What possibilities does fanfiction offer you that traditional storytelling or historical fiction doesn’t?
I grew up in a small town without much access to like-minded communities, so I was behind my computer a lot. I played a lot of Sims, and later—after reading, watching and loving The Hunger Games—I started writing of fanfiction.
Later, this informed much of my practice. I understood this mode of writing as a way of crafting identity, teenagers like myself using highly grossing media franchises as tools to give voice to their desires and to seek refuge in, when their realities are not safe enough or too scary to develop their personhood. There’s also a notable anti-capitalist sensibility to fanfiction, I think, since you essentially create writing which, due its characters and world being intellectual property of a large media conglomerate, could never be profitable. You write it for yourself or for people in the same fandom. There’s a strong sense of reclamation or re-appropriation inherent to fanfiction, that structurally is very subversive (on top of many fanfiction stories being subversive or sexual in nature already.)
In my Ötza fanfiction, there is an added capacity of interlacing different mediatized (and real) universes. Where my original teenage fanfiction was purely Hunger Games fanfiction, Ötza’s story resides potentially everywhere. In a media landscape, and a world essentially, where fiction supersedes reality, and the borders between the two have fatally fused, it becomes quite important to understand our role as consumers. The languages of signifiers that we understand, that think and speak in, are often either owned and copyrighted by media conglomerates, and even more often accessed on algorithmic maze on which it is impossible to decipher real from fake, which is also owned by even bigger media conglomerates. I like fanfiction as a mode of reappropriation, because it inherently subverts the copyright model that we understand, bringing it immediately outside the market, and to online subcommunities. It is the art of overidentification, understanding that I cannot unlearn this mediatized language, but trying to make sense and craft something ridden with desire and agency in this maze of online media content.