Fakewhale in Dialogue with Levi van Gelder
At Fakewhale, we’ve long been fascinated by artistic practices that challenge dominant narratives and rewrite established histories. Levi van Gelder’s ongoing project around Ötzi, reimagined as the undead, post-historical drag persona Ötza, is a brilliant and disruptive example of such work. Through layered fan fiction, performance, and video installations, van Gelder gives voice and agency to a body historically dissected and silenced. With wit, irreverence, and emotional depth, Ötza reclaims space as narrator, diva, and theorist. In the following conversation, we delve into the creative origins of the project, the role of humor and embodiment, and what it means to write fiction as a mode of liberation from institutional memory.
Fakewhale: Ötza radically subverts the museological and scientific frameworks that have defined her for decades. No longer a passive object, she emerges as a self-authored subject who resists and rewrites. What first drew you to this idea of reclaiming narrative control through fan fiction and drag?
Levi van Gelder: I think this subversion and reclamation started with quite a simple gesture toward this mummy, which was quite an intuitive one. I have been quite obsessed with Ötzi since I visited the Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano in 2019 (even before that actually.) It was during the pandemic when I decided I wanted to write fan fiction again, yearning for my prolific years as a teenager writing a 10k chapter every other week about the Hunger Games. As it was such a sterile moment, I needed something generative. Ötzi was still in my mind, and I was rewatching The L Word at the time, so I just decided to write a scene in which Ötzi walked into The Planet during season 2 of The L Word. Ötzi—of course—turned into Ötza, since we’re talking about The L Word and you don’t matter in the show if you’re not a lesbian woman. From there, Ötza kind of took over. Interestingly, just the first chapter was from the POV from someone else: Alice Pieszecki, describing how Ötza walked into the bar/club, long shimmery legs, two humble dangly teeth and barely a nose. (She was also bald at that point.) Every chapter afterwards was from Ötza’s perspective, exploring and crafting her character, identity, desires, fears and dream with every different re-emergence, firstly also in The L Word universe, but quickly she reiterated in different media franchises: The Hunger Games, Sex and the City, Dance Moms, and much more.
It was much later where I started to understand what this original gesture actually meant, and how Ötza grew so quickly into a complex character through the writing of these chapters. As you described in the introduction, Ötzi is categorically silent and silenced, the story extracted from the bodily remains without consent, and afterwards further extrapolated based on scientific paradigms and pre-existing prejudice about the prehistoric man. In the Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, the corpse of Ötzi is placed in a cooling cell that you can watch, voyeuristically and quite perversely, from behind a small window. I think what struck me was the huge sadness surrounding this body. I think the original gesture I made, of giving her the agency of writing fan fiction, is me trying to grant this corpse something, a tool for reclamation, for regaining agency. Of course very futile, but the tools that have been instrumental for me to reclaim agency over my identity when I was younger, were fan fiction and drag. So these were the only tools I could share. Ötza emerged, and she continued to write herself.
The shift from Ötzi to Ötza is more than a change in name or gender. It’s a symbolic transformation that began during the pandemic, a time when our sense of linear time and reality was destabilized. How did that moment shape your relationship to storytelling, embodiment, and the creation of alternate realities?
As I mentioned above, it was an incredibly sterile moment, with very little impetus and input. Maybe it’s the moment where our lives most resembled being in a cooling cell, being frozen in time, maybe the moment where it was the easiest to understand Ötzi’s predicament. However, I don’t think that’s necessarily why it started then. Practically, I think I had the most time reading a lot, and also needed a way to cogitate and translate new ideas. I have found fan fiction to be an amazing way to do exactly that. I am not an academic, but I do love to engage with theory, not only reading it but also reproducing it into new thought. As an artist, flattening out everything I consume, whether it’s Dance Moms or Lacan, into a horizontal field or references to re-appropriate and misconstrued freely, through the hyper-specific lens of Ötza, has been an incredibly rewarding way of understanding my role as a prosumer. I simply think, during covid, my cup hath runneth over if you will, and I needed to write.
You started writing fan fiction as a teenager, appropriating and transforming popular narratives. Now, with Ötza, you’re using the same tools to rewrite capital-H History. What has remained constant in your approach since those early days, and what has evolved?
Uff, good question. I think there’s some similarities but the two are also quite different. To give some backstory about my early fan fiction days: I mostly wrote a Submit-Your-Own-Tribute Hunger Games fan fiction story about the 71st Hunger Games on a Dutch fan fiction platform. SYOT-style means other members of this community can submit a character to your story by answering a character development list. The story was about 24 tributes (most of them submitted by my own fake other accounts), and followed all of them before, during preparations for and during the Hunger Games. It also introduced new characters, new plotlines, new POV’s on the way, so the story grew exponentially and I was never able to finish it, though it was over 300,000 words.
Obviously engagement with the community was a big thing in the original story, and the entire thing was also mostly a big writing exercise, since I had to write so many different storylines, many of which I also didn’t so much care for. What might be more interesting were the storylines I did care for, some of which became interesting parallels to my own daily life and identity. I remember experimenting with my sexuality through writing vicariously about a gay mentor of one of the tributes, also feeling pressure to not focus too much on this character since people (the four people that actually read it) might find out that this was maybe close to some auto-fiction.
The thing is, I never wrote first-person roleplay: Levi goes to Hogwarts, f.e. There was always a displacement necessary for me to engage with the source material, to develop characters and worlds and build storylines. For Ötza, it is of course quite similar. Needless to say, Ötza’s thoughts are not the thoughts of this corpse in the cooling cell, they are my thoughts. And I think much of how I exist in the world, the things I deal with, are very much reflected in Ötza’s fan fiction, but even more thwarted and distorted.
Mostly, there is an added capacity of interlacing different mediatized (and real) universes. Where the original story was purely Hunger Games fan fiction, 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 your role as a consumer. 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 fan fiction 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.
Ötza, Uninterrupted is presented as a five-channel video installation embedded in faux-Neolithic paper-mâché sculptures. What guided your decisions around spatial installation and material choices, and how do they shape the viewer’s experience of the work?
I wanted to create an introduction to Ötza’s pluriverse through a video installation. As Ötza exists in multitudes, emerging anew in every new fan fiction vignettes, it was quite important that it had to be a sequence of different Ötza’s. I liked the idea of re-appropriating the stone circle for this purpose. It gives a clear nod to Ötza’s Neolithic origins—in quite a campy and artificial way, since the stones are made from paper-mache and have quite an attraction park quality to them—and also immediately creates a material and anachronistic dialectic with the screens and tech embedded in them.
Somehow reflects how Ötza likes to present herself: ancient wisdom, though wholly contemporary, but also there’s quite some desperation bleeding into her way of presenting herself. She really wants to tell her story, and often she’s not super good at it. It’s too complex or doesn’t make so much sense or she assumes people understand the same references as her. I like to bring the sculptures and installations together with the same finishing touch, having some (subversively queer) grey duct tape holding together the loose ends, not quite efficiently, a bit awkwardly, seemingly desperate, but A-OK.
The videos are playing on a loop, and when one Ötza is talking the others are waiting for their turns, sometimes listening, sometimes looking around lethargically, sometimes vaping from the operation table. It’s quite an intense environment to be in, surrounded by so many cryodesiccated fan fiction entrepreneurs, but this is also kind of the point. Ötza is omnipresent, and talks (and exists) uninterruptedly. This partly explains the title, which is also—of course—a reference to Girl, Interrupted.
Across different episodes, Ötza oscillates between victim and tyrant, glamorous diva and decomposing relic, sincere and absurd. What interests you about playing with this kind of radical ambivalence in her character?
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 fan fiction 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, by being (potentially) everything.
The fan fiction you write is rich with cultural references, some precise, others playfully misunderstood by Ötza. How do you curate these citations, and how important is it to you that the audience “gets” every layer of meaning?
I guess it goes quite intuitively. I always have many open Google Docs and pages in my notes app that collects references, books, films, jokes. Writing Ötza fan fiction, as I mentioned before, became a very important way to distill and retranslate my own readings and media consumption. The making of compounds of references, characters, signifiers, is one of my favorite things to do. I see it as the same way as making a good joke or a successful metaphor, there needs to be friction, enough overlap to suspend your disbelief and for it not to be completely random, but also weird enough to give an effect which might evoke a good chuckle or speculation. When an audience reads, they have a bit more opportunity to Google some stuff. When the medium is more time-based (performance or video) it’s more of a stream of consciousness of references that is often a bit hard to follow. Meandering through these, and creating modalities, is a bit more important, but Ötza’s own deep urge to share is often the glue that keeps it all together. Her desire to tell her story, bordering desperation, creates an understanding that this doesn’t have to make perfect sense. She misrepresents, gets things wrong, tells half-truths, but it’s fan fiction. She’s writing it for herself at the end of the day.
Drag, in your work, goes beyond performance. It becomes a storytelling tool, a means of embodying a theory-fictional self. How has working with the body and costume changed your own relationship to identity, time, and memory?
Working, making and writing through performing is a really good way to have a more embodied experience of the work you put forward. I guess, for me, there’s a schizophrenic aspect to it as I don’t perform with my own body, but still, having to engage with people through the character you have created makes the urge to tell her story a much more real need. I think a lot of the choices I make as an artist, whether it’s material choices or choices of medium, emerge from Ötza’s very basic desires as a subject of archaeology, as a corpse and as a writer. But also, they reflect my own needs, and my own exploration of identity and gender, and presenting a way to articulate my own artistic voice and give a platform to my ideas and mixture of references. I guess it’s a bit weird that my needs overlap so much with this speculative mummified Neolithic fan fiction writer, but we do what we do.
And when it comes to drag: 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 fan fiction-laced prehistoric drag (that’s a mouthful) as revealing the seams in the construction of historicity. Ötza has an important role as one of the oldest human remains, as a spokesperson for the Neolithic human, which holds a lot of weight. (The role does, Ötza doesn’t, she’s really skinny.) I feel there’s definitely some responsibility to the project when it comes to using drag—like you said—as a storytelling tool, to subvert the totalizing story that the modernist historical project has concocted. Drag is quite powerful, these are all things that I can only do by invoking an alter-ego, wearing a mask and costume, and create through Ötza.
Many of Ötza’s stories unfold in unlikely settings such as art exhibitions, tourist huts, and dance competitions. These spaces seem deliberately chosen to clash with archaeological expectations. How do you think about setting as a symbolic site for rewriting historical narratives?
I guess some of them are very meticulously proposed to question a specific part of Ötzi’s posthuman conundrum. For example, I thought it was funny to have an actual Neolithic corpse be a live-action roleplay actor in a prehistoric hut at an open-air museum for natural history, and I guess—on a very banal level—that gesture does all the rewriting of historical narratives by itself. (Because the chapter was mostly written as a segway to her selling her bootleg merch t-shirts.) Some other settings are scenes from movies that I love, and want to recreate through Ötza. Others are attempts to grapple with the infrastructures in which I present Ötza in the real world. I wrote a series of chapters which very much reside in famous settings in the contemporary art world (Wolfson’s Female Figure, Abramovic’s The Artist is Present, etc.) to understand my position at the art residency I was doing at De Ateliers, and feeling like I was committing to the world of contemporary art in a way I wasn’t doing before. I now find myself writing a lot of stuff about bootleg merch, tax evasion and illegal trade routes, since it’s bookkeeping season and rent is due. I think you see how it works.
Looking ahead, do you see Ötza continuing her undead journey through new formats and timelines, or do you sense this narrative cycle approaching its natural end? Are there other figures or archetypes you’re already thinking about resurrecting and reimagining?
Very much the first option. I love making as Ötza, and I feel like there’s so much to explore and create. Potentially, in the future, I might feel the need to let her go, give her back to the world, let her decompose and become one with the cosmos. Maybe I’ll stumble upon something I simply cannot express as Ötza, and that needs another medium. But for now, I think there’s a lot of unexplored directions that I hope to tap into. And I feel like, by building her world, crafting her identity and lore, she becomes more and more powerful, complex and interesting. I feel like I’m still developing as a maker and Ötza is still developing as a character. There’s much more to write, make and do.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
You may also like
Painting After the Machine: Wade Guyton and the Aesthetics of Reproduction, Error, and Withdrawal
The Computer in the Empty Room There are moments in the trajectory of certain artists that feel like
Invisible Structures: Dan Graham and the Shapes of Critical Thinking
Dan Graham never followed a conventional artistic path. He didn’t attend art school, nor did he re
Liturgies of Black: Thierry De Cordier and the Discipline of Absence
The Discipline of Nothingness There are exhibitions that present artworks, and there are those that
