Ötza / Levi Van Gelder

Interview with Levi Van Gelder

In this interview, the artist shares their artistic journey, the influences that have shaped personal practice, and the role of irony and speculation in deconstructing dominant historical narratives. Through writing, performance, and artistic research, Levi explores the relationship between identity, storytelling, and digital culture. The alter ego, Ötza, is a queer and subversive reinterpretation of Ötzi, the Iceman, transformed into a timeless influencer who rewrites the own story through fanfictioning.

You are a young artist with a dual background in the creative field. Looking back at your adolescence, how would you describe yourself? Was there a turning point, a “click” that changed something?

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. I did this for a couple of years, investing a lot of time in my fanfiction story, which was a so-called SYOT (Submit Your Own Tribute), in which other members of the Dutch Hunger Games Fanfiction community could submit characters for my story. Writing from the perspective of all 24 tributes, this became quite a beast of a story—going over 300,000 words—that I eventually never finished. But looking back, it was a very prolific period and an important mode of writing. There’s something to fanfiction, this very fast mode of writing within an online community of fellow fans, working within an existing set of rules (canon) and just publishing it. Later, this informed much of my practice. Understanding this mode of writing as a way of crafting identity, teenagers like myself employing 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.)

Tell us about your context, not just about yourself as an artist but also about what surrounds you: those things that might seem trivial or even unconventional and completely unexpected but which become defining traits of your identity.

I am very chronically online, which probably doesn’t come as a surprise, so in my practice, I always juggle with a lot of references from digital culture, from pop-culture, but also cross-pollinated by readings of theory. I use a lot of humor, both as Ötza as in my day-to-day life. What else? I live in Amsterdam, I am quite tall, I drink my coffee black, I have self-diagnosed scoliosis and I love my mom.

“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.”

Ötza’s (posthu-) Man Cave of Theory-Fiction, at Semester9, photography: Gert-Jan van Rooij

Ötza, Ontologically Speaking at Mutter, photography: Giovanni Salice

Ötza and the Soft Death of Shoshanna Shapiro (and other fanfictions), 2024, photography: Aaron McLaughlin

Ötza and Charlotte Rohde, photography: Nikola Lamburov

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?

“Ötza (through her fanfiction) disrupts the ideas that we have about ourselves and our reality”

Ötza during performance Ötza and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World, still, documented by Arvo Leo

Ötza, Ontologically Speaking at Mutter, photography: Giovanni Salice

Behind the scenes picture of studio of the artist, image courtesy of the artist

Ötza posing with the work of Tom K. Kemp during group show Still Making Art vol. 7 at Arti et Amicitiae, photography: Aaron McLaughlin

Setting aside the artist role, what are the things that inspire, distract, or bring new input to Levi van Gelder? And what, on the other hand, is completely opposite to you or something you simply cannot tolerate?

Okay let’s do a list of recent loves: HBO’s Big Little Lies, this pic of young Michele Lamy sitting on younger Rick Owen’s lap, the 4 songs of Oklou’s yet to be released album choke enough, TikTok icon Soweenie and I’m currently rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness.

In the ongoing development of your art, there are many interconnected macro and micro themes: design, social and meditative impact, the queer world, history… Are there aspects or topics you fear might be misinterpreted or wrongly associated?

Yeah all the time, but I think the project is also built with misinterpretation as one of its cornerstones. 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. Whether someone who reads my writing, sees my performance, watches a video or visits an exhibition understands these multiplicities is a whole other question, of course. I guess that will be a career-long pursuit, and this is probably also why I have been working with the same subject for so long. There’s so much complexity there, and I never feel like I’m doing it justice or can encapsulate these frictions, so I will just keep trying.

What connects you to the character of Ötza? Is it a clear-cut separation, or are there traits you find in both? Or perhaps there are aspects you could never embody in real life but which you experience through this character?

There’s definitely a lot of power in this schizophrenic separation between me and Ötza. I think we definitely have similarities, there’s some recurring jokes that we both say and I think we are both leos (even though they probably didn’t have zodiac signs in 5300 BCE.) But there’s so many of my own ideas, desires, insecurities, and struggles that bleed into the story of Ötza that I think I probably would never give voice to if it weren’t for this weird mode of artistic translation, or at least not in my practice. It can be quite therapeutic to hide my own weird mental fixations and struggles in the writing, and also can be confronting to see how heavy the character has become. My entire artistic practice is basically Ötza now (which I love) but it also becomes important to take care of her counterpart. But this is actually important for any artist, or anyone—really—that can feel alienated by their career or anything else. Maybe Ötza is a way more tangible way of understanding the disembodied experience of continuous productivity and creativity, and how it’s important to leave some things to be just for you, even though I really struggle with that lol.

What will the next step be? How will Ötza be represented in the future? And, referring to yourself as an artist, what is the ultimate goal you would like to achieve or a new direction you would like to explore?

I am currently a participant at De Ateliers, which is a two-year long residency in Amsterdam. We have a big show in May, called Offspring, where I will present a new project around Ötza, which I am very excited for. I am looking to write new chapters of fanfiction, make more video work around Ötza, and hopefully finally get that sponsorship with VOSS. I am very interested to see which disciplinary intersections she can occupy, I really like how the project defies traditional categorizations of medium and discipline. So I’m always looking for opportunities everywhere, to enrich the project but also make it more confusing. She can basically do anything. She’ll press play on her playlist if you want her to be a DJ and she’s a size 6 if you want her to be a model. (I’ve also been told she looks like if Kate Moss had a baby with a sundried tomato, so I think there’s some true modeling potential, for any casting agents among the readers.) But eventually, I definitely want to work towards an extensive compilation of her writing in a nice thick book with a good publisher. HMU if you are a publisher into L Word fanfiction and natural mummies.

Ötza, photography: Nikola Lamburov

Ötza posing with the work of Anne de Vries during group show Still Making Art vol. 7 at Arti et Amicitiae, photography: Aaron McLaughlin

Ötza, photography: Nikola Lamburov