Levi van Gelder’s exhibition, ÖTZA, UNINTERRUPTED (2025), at De Ateliers’ OFFSPRING 2025 in Amsterdam, is more than a critique—it’s an audacious rewriting of history through a radical queer lens.

The exhibition dismantles and reinvents the entrenched narratives surrounding Ötzi, Europe’s oldest known mummy, who has languished under scientific scrutiny since his discovery in 1991. In van Gelder’s vision, Ötzi emerges anew as Ötza, a boundary-defying drag persona, transcending the rigid confines of archaeological inquiry and museum display.

At the heart of ÖTZA, UNINTERRUPTED is van Gelder’s expansive fan fiction project, begun during the Covid-19 pandemic, where Ötza is seamlessly woven into the contemporary queer landscape of Showtime’s iconic lesbian drama, The L Word. This playful yet incisive gesture propels Ötza into scenarios that flout chronological and cultural logic. Ötza, now both author and protagonist, moves fluidly through hundreds of short yet densely intertextual episodes, humorously engaging with her own absurdity. From sardonic tourist guide in prehistoric chic to uncompromising director of the fictitious Ötzy Lee Dance Company, van Gelder’s Ötza relishes paradox, claiming identities that both conform to and rebel against external expectations.

Van Gelder’s interest in fan fiction, emerging from their teenage experimentation, highlights the transgressive potential of appropriating mainstream narratives to forge queer worlds. Ötza becomes a site of confrontation, embodying contradictory states—victimhood and tyranny, brilliance and banality, allure and revulsion—in a playful refusal of singular interpretation. Through a dense layering of pop-cultural citations, van Gelder asserts a radical reclaiming of Ötzi’s image, situating her firmly within the discourse of contemporary queer identity politics.

However, it is in the performances and videos that Ötza truly comes alive, corporealized through drag. Donning a cropped faux-J.W. Anderson hoodie, platinum blonde hair, and fossilized kitten heels, Ötza navigates both high and low cultural spaces with ironic elegance. Her appearances, whether at readings of her own narratives or impromptu guided tours of blockbuster exhibitions at institutions like Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, amplify her agency, visibility, and, significantly, her voice. Here, Ötza openly contests the passive scientific gaze historically imposed upon her, actively reclaiming and reauthoring her identity in real-time interactions with viewers.

Crucially, Ötza’s transformation through drag and fan fiction resists mere novelty, suggesting deeper subversions of identity formation and historical truth-making. Van Gelder’s Ötza challenges the limitations of empirical narratives, embodying a speculative freedom that undermines traditional binaries of subject-object and past-present. By blurring reality and fiction, van Gelder not only repositions Ötza but also critiques the very processes of historical storytelling, exposing their inherent biases and erasures.

ÖTZA, UNINTERRUPTED thus stands as a sophisticated intervention into both cultural memory and queer representation. By hijacking a Neolithic mummy’s story, Levi van Gelder reveals the power and possibilities latent within appropriation and reinvention. Through the liminal figure of Ötza, van Gelder insists on the right to imagine otherwise, compelling viewers to reconsider how histories are authored and who gets to author them. This exhibition, provocative and layered, boldly situates van Gelder as a pivotal voice among artists redefining queer aesthetics and contemporary cultural discourse.