Not many people play with the contours of “reality” and “simulation” as much as Levi van Gelder does—the very alive and vibrant artist moonlights as a “part-time cryo desiccated corpse from the Neolithic [sic]” named Ötza, a hot girl whose limbs sometimes happen to fall off but wants nothing more than a sponsorship from VOSS water and to write her fanfiction. Drag doesn’t often get necromance-y, but maybe it should more often—Levi’s insights into the facts and fabrications that comprise this character, their momager-esque relationship to Ötza, and their conceptions of what makes drag valuable as an epistemological tool are truly radical. I needed more background than usual to begin to parse the reality of Levi’s practice:

Levi van Gelder: I did my master's here in Amsterdam at the Sandberg Instituut, where I got really obsessed with Ötzi—Europe’s original mummy.

I was already diving into the politics of conservation of historical artifacts, then more specifically, human remains.

I found myself in Bolzano, Italy in 2019 at the Museum of Archeology, and I was very intrigued by the sort of paradoxical state that this corpse is in. There's a huge, metal wall with a really small window, and this corpse is in its cooling cell, ready to kind of be subjected to scientific research at any time. Then there's a little queue of tourists, waiting to peer through the condensation on the window. There's a YouTube video online in which they say that based on the length of Ötzi’s vocal cords, they could extrapolate his voice, and then they play this really weird, robotic voice saying A, E, O.

In my research, this seems to come with a high degree of fantasy.

The story is a very powerful one, fed by the scientific paradigm of our time, the norms and values that we already have—heteronormativity, patriarchy, neoliberalism. It even becomes a bit of a murder mystery, because there's an arrow in the mummy’s shoulder. So a very specific story is being sketched around Ötzi, which is not necessarily false, but is partly fictitious, as any fact is.

Em Seely-Katz: What do you feel like your entry point into this story is?

L: My project is very much a way of engaging with that as not an anthropologist or an archeologist, and also not having the academic backbone to really dive into countering that narrative. But being able to propose an alternative—extrapolating directly in the opposite direction, and reappropriating this, story into a drag character who really plays with artifice and exaggeration.

Taking this corpse into the 21st century and making her Ötza, a chronically online fanfiction writer.

Fanfiction is very important, because it's a way to craft your identity and say whenever your physical reality doesn't permit you to, and because she's locked in her cooling cell, she takes her refuge in fanfiction to save her—her counter factual salvation from her faith.

E: I’m so interested in the way that you have constructed Ötza’s body, bridging the gap between sexy girl and corpse—it makes it impossible not to notice the similarities and differences between those two beings.

L: The drag was really a parallel for me to try to use to undo the seams of the historicity of this story, to show the subjectivities of history-making.

E: We glorify these random figures just because they’ve been dead for so long, even though they could have just been some hot girl…

L: The Ötza drag also reveals the themes of gender in this story for me—it makes a lot of sense to think about heteronormativity and masculinity in this context.

There's this wax recreation of Ötzi which looks exactly like Wim Hof, the “Ice Man,” so I wrote about Ötza in the finale of The Hunger Games, fighting to the death with Wim Hof. She always has a really big vendetta with emblems of masculinity, in a way.

E: You need to look up the story of Wim Hof almost killing himself from giving himself anema with a public fountain—in Amsterdam, like you are now!

L: Oh my god, that’s incredible.

E: Do you think that Ötza has a future, or, do you think that she's more of an imminent figure? Does she have goals?

L: I guess her metaphysical state is very imminent, because she's always in this cycle of regeneration, creating a new chapter, a new way to resurface, with death always looming.

I mean, don't tell her this, but I feel like this sort of self-transcendence that she's looking for might be death, which is maybe not so fun to hear, but also this death is withheld from her in a way, a sit is for other “artifacts.”

Apart from that, I try to really position her as a fanfiction entrepreneur, a multihyphenate, even, so I always try to have her really on that grind. She's been desperately trying to get a sponsorship deal with VOSS because she is a huge fan of their water.

I think she also just likes to reiterate that she only drinks water, sort of counteracting the fact that it’s said she had a snack that was very high in fat—Ibex meat—before she passed. She doesn't love that rumor, so she's been fasting and drinking VOSS, but they haven’t gotten back to her (yet). That’s her goal, I think—to get that sponsorship!

E: I really like the way that you have externalized Ötza, I think that’s really healthy for you—it makes the whole character more interesting and compelling, and I’m able to suspend my disbelief more. I really don't fuck with it when people are like,“You'll never know who you get, me or my character, we're fluid, like we're interchangeable, can't control it.” That sounds… not good to me!

L: Totally—Lamictal on the scene, please.

I'm like Ötza’s Kris Jenner, essentially.

And she's very much taken over my entire artistic practice at the moment, but I think that separation definitely helps—a healthy distance. Method acting is so weird when they're like, “I need to starve myself and do cock and ball torture in front of a room of 20 old ladies, to prepare myself for this role.” It's like, I think that maybe you should be able to imagine all of that, and then pretend that you're doing it, because that's acting.

E: [Laughing] I can’t tell you how much I agree with this. Are there any other historical or well-known figures that you feel like would be good inspiration for a drag-inspired project? I know that you love Slavoj Zizek and Abby Lee Miller...