The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
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LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
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LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
The Mnemosyne: inside curated moodboards is where we ask artists to walk us through their artistic research with an archive of visual bits (archived images, camera roll pictures, book pages, videos), to contrast algorithmic feeds and restore the fun in personally-curated visual boards.
No one in the art world is cooler than Ötza right now. She’s tall, stunning, knows everything about fanfictions, philosophy and all-female TV shows. She lives at the hybridisation of theory and pop culture. She’s a “cryodesiccated mummy”, and she was created in 2021 by artist Levi van Gelder, an Amsterdam-based artist who graduated from Design Sandberg Instituut just before giving life to this schizoid character, which feels like the perfect exemplification of our times, and of the current contemporary art world landscape. More than all, Levi’s research tackles themes such as post-truth, extreme subjectivity, the political charge of fanfictionin-ing and worldbuilding.
Inspired by Deleuze, Mark Fisher and Kylie Jenner, Ötza is the protagonist of a billion different stories all happening in the same quantic timeline. We asked Levi to put together some visual bits to tell us (if that’s even possible) the mummy’s history. Here follows the fragments the artist selected.
LVG: A very first sketch of what I imagined Ötza would look like. On 19 April 2021 (I had to dive deep into my Google Docs to find an exact date), I sat down behind my laptop and wrote about Neolithic mummy Ötzi walking into The Planet, the infamous lesbian bar from The L Word (2024). This single fan fiction chapter about Ötza launched a thousand more, imagining the cryodesiccated mummy — now turned fan fiction entrepreneur — in different media universes. This sketch dates back to December 2022, when — with a hefty syllabus of fan fiction vignettes — I decided I wanted to do a reading of these chapters, which I naturally couldn’t do as myself. I reached out to my best friend Leila El Alaoui, costume designer and stylist, who helped bring Ötza alive. Small changes from the sketch; she ended up without eyebrows, without a belly button piercing, without a Diesel miniskirt as a top, and a few inches more than this blonde bob.
LVG: One of the OG chapters — later reinterpreted in a scene for Ötza, Uninterrupted (2025) — covered a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Or rather Ötza dreaming about a sex scene with Brad Pitt. Not because she’s obsessed with him, but because he’s obsessed with her, since he has a tattoo of her on his forearm. Luckily, Ötza has read Lacan (and she gets it), so she can make sense of her existence as an external, detached libido on Brad’s skin.
LVG: As not only a fan fiction entrepreneur but also a freelance t-shirt tycoon, Ötza has developed a myriad of funky t-shirt designs. She developed most of these designs during her shift as a tourist guide / live action roleplay actor at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Ana, where she needed some semantic distractions on her boob-area to give visitors of museums a different focal point than her abject appearance. Her most iconic design reads “Carrie Miranda Charlotte Semantics”. This one was unfortunately left on the cutting room floor.
LVG: A selfie. Here, Leila developed a special, cropped museum-guard moment, complete with a pseudo-functioning walkie-talkie and a counterfeit ID badge for the SouTy Museum of Archaeology. She is wearing her signature Neolithic kitten heels with clear straps, added post-liminally and intentionally anachronistically.
LVG: Alice’s chart from season 1 of The L Word, reimagined. In a throwback to Ötza’s sapphic origins, Ötza tries to fanfictionally map out an epistemological rendering of libidinal interconnectedness covering the lesbian sphere of influence in LA, extending all the way to Pacoima. By working on it, it unintentionally turned into an attempt to map the precise chronology of her own pre/post-historical pluriverse, covering the inconsistencies and anachronisms found after rigorous research of texts written by the cryodesiccated party. Whether she’s successful is for the art critics to decipher.
LVG: Two other characters — here depicted in faux-neolithic rock sculptures — in Otza’s pluriverse are the Bogdanoff twins. They were famous for scamming (some of the) scientific academic world in 2001 and 2002 by writing physics papers that were published in reputable scientific journals but later debunked by professionals as "a hoax perpetrated on the physics community”. However, during a failed double date at a Jamie’s Italian in an undisclosed city (she brought her counterfactual twin sister Ötzette that she devised just for that double date, after it she ceased to exist) she realized that they were only interested in their own strife with science’s regime of truth and did not want to hear about her extensive bowel sessions with the Italian scientists. She will never date twins again.
LVG: The last bit of lore-drop to tie it all together. As an extension to Ötza’s reimagining of The Chart, this is a forgery of J.G. Ballard’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968), now written by Ötza (Ö) with Alice Pieszecki’s name (as she never got one of those.) Under this pseudonym she expands upon her and Hegel in an essay that was never written. The original text — a scientific report of experiments to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan — was distributed at the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco as a prank. Mark Fisher calls this in his PhD dissertation (Flatline Constructs) the perfect act of subversion, but also countercharges that it shows that subversion is impossible “now”. Hypercapital absorbs the irrational instead of repressing, and the distinction between fake and the real has been replaced by a loop of fiction. That now was the 1980s of the convention or the 1999 it was written in, but it also turned out tragically prophetic. Is satire rendered futile if the distinction between the real and simulation has fatally collapsed?
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