Why and when did Ötza first come to life? Can you tell us the exact moment or day (if you remember) when the idea took shape? What were you doing, and why this particular character? And tell us about the craziest anecdote or the most significant feedback you’ve received with this character.
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). There was a huge sadness to this ancient body and its state of preservation. The corporeal corpse was removed so far away from the museum visitor, neutralized, 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.
Ötzi’s body was exhaustively studied, analyzed and catalogued, revealing much about the life of a Chalcolithic human. Still, the story of Ötzi is no exception to the often heteronormative and patriarchal understanding of prehistoric human life in the collective imaginary. The important question to ask is; how much of this popular story about Ötzi—and thus essentially about the prehistoric human—is really objectively true, and how much is filled in with scientific paradigms, prejudice, and capitalist humanist ideas of where we come from as humans? There’s actually an anecdote that is quite important: 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.)
After some other projects about Ötzi, I was ready to move on, until I found myself very bored during covid (like everyone else) and wanting to get back to fanfiction. I was watching The L Word at the time (obsessed with The L Word) and yearned to my prolific days as a fanfiction writer. I had the idea to write a chapter in which Ötzi (now Ötza) walked into The Planet during season 2. (The Planet is the bar where they all hang out.) This is when Ötza was born, with long shimmery legs, barely a nose and a set of three humble teeth. She was bald in the first chapter but I granted her long blonde locks later.I wrote a couple more chapters in the universe of The L Word, but then transported her to other universes: The Hunger Games, Minecraft, Dance Moms, on a double date with the Bogdanoff twins, Sex and the City, and many others. The character was developed through writing, and when I decided that I wanted to do readings of the writing, I knew that I had to perform as Ötza. So I created a costume with my collaborator and best friend Leila El Alaoui, and Ötza did her first reading in March 2023.
Ötza’s main objective in her (after)life is regaining agency, rewriting her own story from her cooling cell, proposing a transcendental and fictional alternative to the traditional story plucked from her bowels without consent. This has become her own sort of pluriverse of fanfiction vignettes. She is first and foremost a fanfiction writer, she’s a multihyphenate, but also very much an influencer. She is an influencer, since she (unwillingly) by her very existence, or endurance, has influenced so much, in many realms and disciplines of human civilization. This passive mode of proto-influencership was not by choice, and misinterpreted in many ways, so the analogy to the contemporary influencer is then maybe an activation of this influencing, where Ötza (through her fanfiction) disrupts the ideas that we have about ourselves and our reality, precisely because these ideas are built upon the original influencership of Ötzi, as primal prehistoric Man, used as a spokesperson for the contemporary human condition as such.
Does that make sense?
