Otzi and the sublimity of time

A 3D reconstruction of Otzi, the ice mummy, at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Bozen. Pic/Rosalyn D’Mello

Last week I finally had an audience with the ice mummy, Otzi. If you've spent even a day in South Tyrol's capital, Bozen, you will have been subjected to 3D reconstructed portraits of the chalcolithic iceman. The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, where his remains are housed, usually has a serpentine queue of tourists lured by the ubiquitous marketing. Since early December, when we visited the Egyptian Museum in Turin, I had been thinking about museological necropolitics, a term I felt sure I was constructing to encapsulate how the differential display of human remains in western museums attests to legacies of colonialism. European-led excavations in non-European territories frequently yielded preciously embalmed and buried bodies that were then displaced from their intended sites of rest and repurposed into objects of study and display to cater to the consumptive appetites of white folk. Such museological practices were justified in the name of science, just as colonisation was validated by religious evangelism. I discovered, while writing this column, that the philosopher Achille Mbembe describes necropolitics as ‘the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not', which seems connected to the queer theorist Judith Butler's ponderings on what constitutes a grievable life.

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Otzi is a glacier mummy. His body was not ritualistically embalmed, rather, his remains were preserved by ice. Sometime in 1991, a couple of trekkers accidentally came upon the sight of a fully clothed, fully equipped body on the Schnalstal Valley glacier. Studies later placed him as a 46-year-old male who lived during the Copper Age, making him older than the Egyptian pyramids and the Stonehenge.
Though he had stone tools upon his person, he also seemed to have owned a copper axe. Studies revealed that he was murdered. In fact, the museum dedicates an entire floor to the forensic investigations that were conducted to analyse the cause of his death. The body, however, is tucked away from plain sight, so that visitors can decide whether they want to see it or not, a decision made to acknowledge the ethical dilemma of exhibiting his body, I read later, a courtesy that is not extended to Egyptian mummies. I was always overwhelmed by the amount of research energy that was dedicated to Otzi, no part of his body was left undiagnosed, from the tattoos on his skin to the insides of his intestines to his DNA.

What intrigued me most, however, were the sight of the clothes that were found on his person: a cap, a fur coat, a pair of trousers, a leather loin cloth and a pair of lined shoes. Apparently, prior to the discovery of his body, the only remnants the scientific community had of apparel dating that far back were the fragmentary remains found in lake dwellings in the Circum-Alpine region, mostly consisting of woven or knitted plant fibres, not animal-derived materials. It's his attire that bears the most civilisational cues, and they were fairly sophisticated, and one could see the seams that held the fibres in place.

And of course, that made me wonder whether they had been sown by him or whether they might have been made by a woman. I think I felt the same tinge of sadness I felt while I was at the Egyptian Museum in Turin, that despite all the artefacts buried along with the corpse that bear information about its relational world, the absence of a personal narrative suggests we can never touch their selfhood. We can only speculate about who they might have been or what qualities they may have possessed, but can never know for sure what their personalities may have been like, which made me think about the limits of genetic material. Maybe our selves are windows to our souls? Intangible, inarticulable.

Confronting such an aged body made me think about geological time, a humbling idea when one is ringing in a new year, because it subverts our experience of chronology as linear. Glacial time is something inconceivable, like galactic time. I wondered how the pulse of my blood relates to the blinking of a dying star. I thought about the majestic nature of a single moment of joy in the face of inter-galactic bodies that have been witnessing deep time. I had read somewhere that the body is constantly renewing itself and shedding dead cells. What do we preserve of ourselves amid our continual dying and resurrecting? What traces of the core of our being do we offer to the people who constitute our world?

I thought about the immensity of our personal memories of ourselves and each other and what information they hold about what we value and cherish. This morning I was reading an article by Priya Ranganathan about the phenomenon of mass flowering among plants, and how the event of the flowering of the neelakurinji is a calendar for Indigenous tribes who recall all important life events in relation to the last bloom. I already spotted the yellow Ginster flower that heralds the onset of spring. This year I am plotting to be in India as spring turns to summer.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.