Ötza was born three times: for the first time around the year–we cannot be sure, as pre-history dictates variability–3.300 BCE, for the second time in 1991, when (s)he was found by mountaineers, and in 2020 AD, re-incarnated through Levi van Gelder’s performance and writing practice. Ötza was found frozen in the Alps ever since the Copper Age. Because of the extraordinary state of Ötza’s mummified, frozen body, it has been subject to scientific scrutiny and subsequent speculation. She was lactose intolerant, covered in tattoos, wore cobblers (Rombaut) and was wielding a bottle of VOSS. 

Most contemporary scientists agree that recorded history starts around 3200 BCE. Ötza lived just before the start of history. And thus we speculate, make educated guesses, fantasize. Even though the scientists and researchers did a great job at examining Ötza’s stomach contents and discussed endlessly when and where exactly she must have died, these speculations and facts don’t satisfy us wholly. We need more to paint a picture of this person in this world that looks so little like ours: we need gossip, projection, we need colliding timelines, warped presences and stretched narratives: we need fan-fiction.

Ötza became world famous, a post-mortem celebrity if you will, and celebrities need fan-fiction. Amsterdam-based artist Levi van Gelder works with performance, writing, sculpture and video work. He explores fanfiction as a tool for queer resistance and counterfactual reclamation of histories and fictions. By writing, performing and making as Ötza, 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. 

Recently, The Couch published 16 chapters of Ötza fanfic. Lucky for us, CHAPTER 7: THE PREHISTORIC HUT and CHAPTER 59: THE BELASTINGDIENST hadn’t yet seen the day of light, and we are delighted to present them here as an e-log.

She was always cold when she had to do the shift in the prehistoric hut. She reluctantly zipped up her hoodie a little bit higher. She preferred to have it open, because she was wearing her favorite t-shirt underneath. But it was just too damn cold.

The families that visited the open air museum for natural history in Santa Ana where she landed a gig as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor never quite knew what to do with her. The kids were scared of her. Their parents often greeted her with an awkward restraint, or pushed their screaming kids towards her so they could take a picture of her with their iPads. 

One time there had been a woman that visited the hut with her elderly mother. Her mother had been so unsettled by Ötza’s appearance, that she started hitting her with her walking cane.

After that incident, she started wearing funky t-shirts during her shifts to kind of subvert the attention, to make people feel more at ease, to give them a conversation starter or just a focal point other than her abject appearance. It became a bit of a project, hunting down iconic semantic designs at Santee Alley, which is where she found a t-shirt saying “Italians do it better!” She also started visiting provincial flea markets on the weekends and had multiple accounts on Vinted, which is where she found her—by then— favorite t-shirt, saying: “I’m sorry ladies, I’m taken… Taken a shit!” After a while, she got too critical, and started making them herself. The first one was “Always historicize!”, quoting Fredric Jameson, as sharp institutional critique on the open air museum ánd herself—as a 5300 year old mummy—working there with all the ontological repercussions implied, which totally flew over the heads of the normcore visitors.

So she tried “The Body (without organs)”, accompanied by a horny, drooling emoticon, which also didn’t get much reception—apart from a lengthy monologue of a guy with bad breath who said he had only one kidney. She tried “South-Tyrolian Piss Water”, “Uncanny Valley Girl”, “Don’t look at my protrusible paleolithic cyborg shaft”, “I steal at Albert Heijn to go… it’s my hunty-adderall instinct”, “Critique of Pure Reason: Roman Reloaded: The Re-Up” and one just saying “Drug Dealer”, which definitely got some reactions.

She was wearing her “Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte & Semantics” t-shirt when the director of the museum came to visit her in her hut during work hours. After showing some fake interest in her work day, he came to the point.

“We got word that you have been wearing some inappropriate t-shirts during working hours, Ötza. Although we very much appreciate your creative input—since we of course also hired you because of your creative skills, right, and artistic point of view—I am afraid that people are misconstruing the phrases on your t-shirts as being affiliated with the brand of the museum. So I think we have to be a bit more mindful with them. But, since we like the idea of customized t-shirts, I asked our communications team to devise some t-shirt ideas that fit the brand and values of the museum. So… we designed this shirt specially for you.”

He pulled out a t-shirt from his briefcase. Ötza could already see the cheap polyester and corporate color blue with her empty eye-sockets. On the t-shirt a little bearded man with a little loincloth was pictured holding a bow and arrow, with underneath the text “Ötza Never Gives Up!” in a sort of tribal-esque font. The director smiled at her eagerly.

“I… I like it,” was the only thing she could utter.

“I’m happy to hear, Ötza. We’re still working on some other ideas.” He kept on smiling at her, almost intrusive now, expecting more affirmation. But she just looked back at him with a vacant disoriented glare. Silent. “But… I guess… If you have any suggestions yourself?”

She took a breath. “Crusty cumrag.” 

She said it resolutely and with a toothless smile. Not because she didn’t have any teeth but because she thought that a smile without teeth would seem more confident..

“Come again?”

“Crusty cumrag,” she repeated. “Like a rag that you use after jerking off, but it has been in your nightstand for a while so it gets all crusty and hard. Like a sock. But I think crusty cumrag moves better in the mouth than crusty cumsock. I think it’s the repetition of ‘r’s. Obviously you don’t say it, it’s written on the t-shirt. But I think a good t-shirt phrase makes people say the phrase in their head out loud. Or totally out loud, that has happened too sometimes. So in that sense I think phonetics are also quite important. But if you think crusty cumsock is better we can also consider that?”

Well, he didn’t like crusty cumrag or crusty cumsock. But it did create a good starting point for negotiation, which is why she has her encrypted Harry Styles foreskin t-shirt now, paid for by the museum. It said: “I REALLY 1T 2 PEACEFULLY RE3T IN HARRY'S 4SKIN”. A bit complex but otherwise management never would have approved it. Has to be realistic, right.

The eyes of the creature in front of Ötza—probably less than 2 meters away but separated by a thick sheet of greasy glass—seemed like they were carved by an Italian sculptor. The deep, heavy sockets reminded her of the time she tried to create Cher in the Sims 2. She thought about taking the train back home, downloading Blender, and animating the old chimpanzee’s eyes in 3D, for her to gaze at the digitally sculpted peepers for eternity through the mirror of her computer screen. (But she didn’t have those skills.) She put her hand against the glass, and the ape moved his gaze for a split second, after returning to the vacant stare it had before. 

“Oh how I enjoy your presence, magnificent ape,” she said, her words transforming into condensation on the glass. “Not a thought in your stupid little monkey brain.”

She let her sweatish hand slide awkwardly down the glass, making a beepy-eeky-squeaky sound that upset the chimpanzee a bit. She let out a deep exhale, which didn’t relieve her one bit.

“The simpleness of being a monkey, it must be marvelous,” she said with a bad British accent. “You sit behind the glass, the whole world a mere spectacle to you, not even aware that you are the spectacle yourself. People coming and leaving, no one able to actually bother, question, detain you for you are protected by the wall in between, a portal from the world of laborious freedom to delicious ignorant captivity. You don’t even know what tax avoidance means, do you, my dear monkey friend? You only have to worry about who to fling your shit to next! How delicious that must be! To simply fling your dropping towards another being, without repercussion or guilt! Oh–how I envy you!”

She sighed again, and reluctantly broke eye contact (or whatever she thought was eye contact, since the ape was staring at his own reflection). Her Apple Watch told her it was 2:30, time to get to the tax office of the Belastingdienst in Apeldoorn.

See, Ötza had a multitude of brass plate companies (which is not the same as shell companies. They were also shell companies, but Ötza liked the term brass plate companies better) in European onshore tax havens like Ireland and, of course, The Netherlands, to employ some base erosion and profit shifting tax tools on her profit through channeling royalty payments to offshore tax havens like the British Virgin Islands and the Bahama’s. These royalty payments were based on intellectual property licensing schemes, and created a Dutch Sandwich tax loophole provided by the governments of The Netherlands and Ireland. Her South-Tyrolean based party DJ company owned a plethora of copyrights, patents and trade secrets, some f.e. being the mixing of cold brew and cum, the concept of late night snunch (late night snack and lunch) and the highly unpopular queerty keyboard (doesn’t have the ‘w’ and the ‘e’ twice). The hypocritical Dutch government requested an examination of her tax situation when she filed for her latest copyright on the imploded strap-on, which was described as “a vacuum of negative space of where could have been a strap-on but there is not (for her pleasure)”. They suspected that the creation of this intellectual property might be a licensing scheme for tax avoiding purposes. Which it was.

“Wish me luck, darling monkey. But before I leave, lest I remind you of one thing. Count your blessings, monkey-love, be grateful for your exemption from the horrors of humanity; the malicious, jealous humans trying everything to orchestrate your downfall, that cannot even let the smallest little elaborate tax scheme slide, that just WANT you to be unhappy and poor. My heavens, monkey, I can’t explain to you the imminent and ever-present fear of the possible future publishing of the Paella Papers. Or Pansexual Papers. Or Patchouli Papers, Paul Frank Papers, Paypal Papers or fucking Pathological fucking Patriarchal fucking Passive-Aggressive Pastacchio Papers, in which your undamaged namesake would be tarnished for the world to see! I would be canceled, blocked, shadowbanned, doxxed, oh my goodness, monkey, how happy you must be to be immune to this horrendous faith.”

“It’s pistacchio you dumb cunt,” mumbled the chimpanzee under her breath when she left.