Agnes Questionmark on Bodies as Organisms, Her Ever-Shifting Art Practice and Post Humanism

Words: Arianna Caserta

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Watching Agnes Questionmark’s fascinating evolution as she becomes one of the most interesting characters in the contemporary art world feels like reading a book you never want to end. Born in Rome in 1995, the artist keeps mutating, changing skin, flowing like a raging river, creating new mythologies around the state of her own existence on earth. 

Taking inspiration from Posthuman Feminist studies such as Astrid Neimanis’ Bodies of Water, Agnes’ early works imagined the human body as inseparable from the water element: the idea of a “more-than-human” being a dynamic extension of the ocean itself, one that Neimanis calls “hypersea”. By doing so, the artist submerged herself in pools of water where the boundaries of her body could lose sharpness, and transformed into tentacular sea creatures - in her 2021 performance Transgenesis - with shape-shifting bodies.

In 2023, the artist transformed into a new hybrid organism for a new long durational performance called CHM13hTERT, that saw her suspended twelve hours a day for sixteen consecutive days. For the performance, Agnes became a creature struggling to adapt to a new body, one born out of a new genetic engineering experiment. What determines the distinction between artificial and natural, after all? And is it so hard to imagine technological evolution as something that can bring us closer to nature, instead of farther away from it? 

Agnes' universe is made up of frantic and moving attempts to reach the perfect result, the search for that one experiment needed to transcend humanness and create a new species. Starting from a transfiguration of the limits imposed by one’s birth-assigned gender, Agnes’ work addresses contemporary reflections on the status of our bodies with technological innovations and the fluidity of our identity. Diving into her world of aquatic creatures and interspecies beings, we talk to her about how feeling constrained in a finite shape can inspire an unlimited space of creation

One of the most fascinating themes of your work is the fine line between myth and science. You have repeatedly talked about the fact that we live in an era of post-truth, and if someone else is willing to suspend their disbelief to believe our personal narrative, then it has already become true. Can you talk about how creating your personal universe was salvific for you? 

There is an urgent need for new terminologies to affirm a fluid, iridescent and constantly changing being. Language limits and hides a latent power. I destroyed everything, making every normative system fail: name, body, identity, gender, humanness, and so on. I became Agnes Questionmark, a nonexistent, insatiable, perpetually evolving being. One day man, one day woman, human, animal and then again machine, prosthesis, silicone and synthetic. Through the artifact of gender identity, subjectivity and genetics, we will never arrive at an understanding of the shell that holds the creative and generative power of the (non)human body.

You envision the body as something open to connections and open to new entities whose guests we are or are hosting. Do you think that this moment in history favors this vision of the human being, or that we are not ready yet to conceive the body as continually expanding?

The term used by Paul Preciado is useful for understanding the body at this moment in history: a “somateca." The "human" body is layered and complex, but at the same time capable of changing its "nature" and genetic course. Writing the body in a world where unfortunately there are not enough words to be able to talk about “we”: an equal and egalitarian we, or as J. Butler understands it, "a more expansive sense of we”. But I know it's hard work.

If you can't find the right tools, you have to create them.

It is only through failure, whether in a glitch of a screen, a "strike" of abstinence, in the artificiality or syntheticity of transgender bodies that the direction of any normative and dominant system can be recovered. Human beings have failed to raise their own hegemonic crest.

Is there any artist from the contemporary art scene with whom you would like to collaborate in a four-handed project, or you prefer to continue working alone for now? 

Dr. Josie Zayner (known as Jo Zayner) is a scientist and artist with a PhD in genetic and biomolecular engineering. She worked at NASA and then built herself a biopunk lab/studio in Texas where she performs experiments on her own body that are considered problematic for science and national security. 

Meeting her and visiting her lab was love at first sight. She and her work constitute the real and palpable enactment of what I present, only metaphorically, in my ideas and creations. They are for her what she wishes to pursue through her scientific experiments. A seminal phrase she said to me was, "Art can do what science cannot.” A perfect blend, as if Frankenstein could work with his own creature.

This year I am publishing my first artist's book with NERO Editions, presented in the form of a pharmaceutical. Inside there will be a package leaflet with critical texts, and an edible pill containing my DNA pulverized by Josie in her lab. I will join Josie this summer in Texas where we’ll work in her lab, in order to reconcile our collaboration toward an exhibition in New York at Gratin Gallery.

Can you tell us about OB/GYN, the performance that took place last Dec. 12 at KÖNIG GALERIE?

Toward what morphology or genetic evolution are we taking our (non)human bodies? The operating room, also called the "theater room" in English, is the place where bodies and other forms come to life, very often while the mind sleeps. At the moment when our identity is sedated, and our subjectivity annihilated, the unconscious and inert body becomes the protagonist of the staging.

Posthuman, transhuman, transpecies, transcorporeal, under surgery we are beings in movement and transition, under the control of the doctors' gloves. 

The performance OB/GYN is aware of the ethical and political dynamics that emerge in an operating room. A transgender doctor, who performs a series of somatic and fetal organ removal and transfusion operations, reveals the exchange between human and nonhuman in medical procedures. The alien and sci-fi reference is quite clear. The performance is one among a series of "Attempts" I have been conducting for the past year, scientific operations that attempt to recover a monstrous body; the scientist attempts—in vain—to restore it to life in an uninhabitable and inhospitable world. This is why the creatures in the "Attempts" series are destined to die, for now.

Since your artistic research never stops, and you continue to be inspired by the very latest discoveries in fields such as genetic engineering, can you give us a hint regarding what's to come? What is inspiring Agnes in this latest period?

I will work on a robot that will bring together the concepts of machine and body under the scrutiny and control of the medical system. The controversial relationship between these elements will lead toward understanding some complex dynamics that we cannot unsee. As I mentioned, the exhibition will be held in New York at Gratin Gallery in collaboration with Josie Zayner.