Agnes Questionmark: artist and living science experiment

“My studio in Rome is like a laboratory. It’s a very weird place,” Italian artist Agnes Questionmark tells me, describing where her impossible creatures come to life. “It’s like a huge warehouse where anything can happen.” I imagine a lab like Dr. Frankenstein’s where Agnes frantically researches and draws the hybrid organisms behind her immersive performances like CHM13hTERT, in which she transformed herself into a mermaid-like creature, suspended for 16 consecutive days in a glass cage on display in Milan’s Lancetti station. “We call one section of the studio the miracle section because I always come up with crazy last-minute ideas that are impossible to achieve but somehow, we make them happen.”

Agnes creates the impossible beings she performs, combining aquatic, plant, and human features to imagine the potential transformations of the human body as we know it. In Portrait of the Homo Aquaticus, she becomes a creature able to breathe underwater, submerged in a pool displayed outside at Camberwell College of Art as part of the university’s 2018 summer show. “Reading about oceanographer Jacques Cousteau’s Homo aquaticus concept was cathartic for me,” she explains. “The possibility that the Homo aquaticus could exist was so strong that I began to perform underwater. Transformation feels natural to me, so every time I read theories of the evolution of the human being, I feel empowered to perform these hybrid beings.” Her Homo aquaticus resembles a human, except for one crucial difference: she can breathe underwater. As a result, she’s put on display and restricted within the confines of the pool—she’s a fish in an aquarium, a curiosity to be marvelled at.

In her practice, Agnes plays the dual role of scientist and subject, performing the experiment and being the experiment at the same time. And just like any science experiment, there are some failures. In Attempt I performed last year at Mimosa House in London, she became a pregnant being participating in a failed birth. In her most recent Attempt, performed for KÖNIG GALERIE in Milan’s STUDIO STXDYOZ in December, she lies on an operating table as metal machinery constrains her and a doctor opens her insides. “I call them Attempts because as an artist, I’m attempting to reach this new evolution of the human being, and I still don’t know what it may be.” Her Attempts are gruesomely visceral as fluids leave her body and body parts are removed—they’re operations for spectators to witness live as they fail. “Our condition as human beings needs to change, but I don’t think we can ever transcend our humanity. That’s why the creatures always die in my Attempts, because there isn’t a world for them to be able to live and sustain their life as non-human.”

The hybrid creatures she enacts and the unsettling experiments she performs feel like they could be sci-fi, the prosthetics and the sculptures she creates are part of the special effects of a film. For Transgenesis, Agnes used tentacle prosthetics to become an octopus-like being, elevated above an empty swimming pool in an abandoned health centre in London. The creature was empowering as she moved, comfortable in an environment that seemed to be made for her—contrasting sci-fi’s often threatening organisms that feel out of place in human spaces. “In sci-fi, there is often a hierarchy between the human and the non-human, where the non-human is destroying the human or the human is colonising the non-human. I’m trying to escape this narrative of oppressing and the oppressor,” Agnes tells me. “I want to reestablish the hierarchy where the ‘other’ is someone that we don’t need to offend, understand, or control. We can just leave it be.”

Agnes immerses us in otherworldly realities beyond the everyday that we’re used to, unsettling us with these creatures that have human characteristics but aren’t human. They’re monstrous and grotesque to us because they’re different from us. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re dangerous. “We need to reshape our idea of what we consider a monster. We need to let the monsters be monsters and we need to become monsters ourselves.”