Ötza is a Neolithic mummy who, in her artistic practice, tries to connect the worlds of fan fiction and entrepreneurship. Her signature features are her long blonde hair (briefly replaced by a platinum bob in chapter III), her natural lip flip, and her pronounced thigh gap, regardless of her age and the increasingly hard-to-hide traces of decay on her complexion. Equally fascinating are her fan fction pieces, in which Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte meet semantics, and a post-Marxist, posthumanist revolt takes on a mute form in a yogic silent retreat inspired by the magazine Tiqqun.
Ötza fights the regime of truth in her work, in her biography, and in courtrooms alike. After a not-too-successful trial for tax fraud and copyright infringement, she does not cease searching for ancillary incomes and tax havens. While the richest 1% tend to place their assets in Caribbean companies and offshore funds, the mummy, who must spend a significant part of her time in a cryogenic chamber, looks for colder places. Perhaps the journey to this tax Arcadia, which is just beginning at Poznań’s galeria skala, will one day end in her own museum in a fiscally friendly Swiss village nestled among Alpine glaciers.
Ötza is a 5300-year-old cryodesiccated fanfiction writer from the Neolithic, an advocate for prehistoric literacy and a self-proclaimed connoisseur of post-historical theory-fiction. Locked in a cooling cell at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, her writings are hopeful yearnings for counterfactual salvation from her fate of archaeological conservation, and an attempt to rewrite the narrative (unfairly) extrapolated from scientific reconstructions.
Ötza is written and performed by artist Levi van Gelder (1995), and created in collaboration with costume designer Leila El Alaoui (1995)
Through working in performance, writing, sculpture and video work, Levi van Gelder explores fanfiction as a tool for queer resistance and counterfactual reclamation of histories and fictions. By writing, performing and making as Ötza (5300 year old mummified fanfiction entrepreneur and drag adaptation of Ötzi the Iceman) Levi creates a subversive, post-historical rendering of the Neolithic mummy, queering (pre)history in a meta-textualized account of misrepresentation, questioning and resisting claims to truth with quick-witted storytelling and playful critique. Levi lives and works in Amsterdam.
Courtesy Levi van Gelder and Kuba Bąk.
Costume design and styling: Leila El Alaoui
DOP video: Giovanni Salice
Editing texts: Maia Kenney, Aidan Hoyle
Tailoring costume: Eef Hietbrink
Airbrushing costume: Ruperto Herrador
All dates and opening hours of the exhibition Ötza, Ofshore will be continuously updated on galeria skala’s Google Maps profile and on the website. skala, ul. Święty Marcin 49a, Poznań
The exhibition is co-financed with funds from the Department of Culture of the City of Poznań and the Department of Culture of the Marshal’s Office of the Greater Poland Voivodeship in Poznań.
