Ötza and the Open Ended Becoming of the World
By Levi van Gelder
Cryodesiccated fanfiction entrepreneur Ötza presents a reading of five new chapters of fanfiction. With some small surgical enhancements (thank you Dr. Zizmor), some new custom couture and renewed commitment to rewrite her lore, Ötza will share her inner workings with an intimate audience. New Ötza t-shirts will be available at the post-reading merchandise stand.
Walk in 19:00 - Start performance 19:30
Accessibility limited, free of charge
Bar open afterwards
About Ötza
Ötza is a cryodesiccated fanfiction writer from the neolithic that has been rising to fame since she emerged from her cooling cell in March 2023. As an advocate for prehistoric literacy and as self-proclaimed connoisseur of post-historical theory-fiction, she has been sharing her writings throughout Amsterdam during readings at venues like Perdu, De School, the Rijksmuseum and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
As her corporeal counterpart is locked in a cooling cell in the Museum for Archaeology in Bolzano (Italy), her writings are hopeful yearnings for a counterfactual salvation from her inhumane fate of science, surveillance and spectacle, and an attempt to rewrite her story that has been (unfairly) extrapolated from scientific reconstructions. In a series of fanfiction vignettes, Ötza reconstitutes into many meta-textualized worlds, dreaming for interminable self-transcendence.
Ötza is developed in collaboration with costume designer and stylist Leila El Alaoui.
Levi van Gelder is an artist living and working in Amsterdam, working in performance, writing, sculpture and video work. In his work, he explores fanfiction as a tool for queer resistance and counterfactual reclamation of histories and fictions. Through writing, performing and making as Ötza—5300 year old mummified fanfiction entrepreneur and drag adaptation of Ötzi the Iceman—he creates a subversive, post-historical rendering of the Tyrolean mummy, queering (pre)history in a meta-textualized account of misrepresentation, questioning and resisting claims to truth with quick-witted storytelling and playful critique. Van Gelder graduated from the Sandberg Instituut and is a current participant of De Ateliers (‘24-’25).