In Conversation: Agnes Questionmark
Agnes Questionmark, TRANSGENESIS (2021). The Orange Garden & Harlesden High Street. Courtesy of the artist.
Agnes Questionmark, Falling in Water (2023). Centre d’art contemporain, Genève. Courtesy of the artist.
Anna Prudhomme: Could you begin to introduce yourself to Speciwomen readers?
Agnes Questionmark: My name is Agnes, I am 27 and I was born and raised in Rome. Graduated from Camberwell College of Arts with a BFA in photography, I am now pursuing a MFA at Pratt Institute in New York. Performance, sculpture, photography, video and sound intersect together within my work.
As a transgender biopolitical subject, I embrace the constant flux of transformation. Inter-discipline is something that is embedded in my life and professional practice. My fluidity is a challenge to the constant reconstructions of gender and identity I am currently facing. I do not consider myself ‘human’, in its dominance and normative sense, but rather as something yet to be defined. I believe in a hybrid being in evolution which subjectivity is built upon the complex contrivances of nature, technology, humans and nonhumans.
AP: Where does Agnes Questionmark come from?
AQ: Agnes has always been a question– a search – ‘where are you Agnes?’ - the ‘?’ symbol appeared to be the most suitable surname to frame its un-representability. Soon after my transition, my name turned into ‘Agnes?’. The question opens up its signifier to a speculative signified. I have no idea who or what Agnes is or what it will be. Since an answer cannot be found, I seek comfort in keeping it as a question.
This is a strictly codified world, where everything needs to be readable and understandable - on documents, emails, or bureaucratic handles. It seems as if questions cannot be left unanswered. In order to find solace between humans I had to transform the « ? » to «Questionmark».
It’s a sort of irony of the use of symbols and punctuation marks, in dialectic languages and spoken words. The interrogation mark as well as another kind of punctuation mark are often overshadowed and unaccepted. I decided to embrace the abject sign into my abject self-identification.
Agnes is not my birth name, it’s my chosen name. It comes from Agnes Martin, the American painter which work I met at Tate Modern, London in 2017. One of her paintings transported me from the museum space into the sea, gazing at the horizon. That place for me is the interaction of multiple natural elements, the sea, the sky and the sun. In that line there is an invisible encounter that doesn’t take place physically. That abstract bond for me is Agnes, an unreachable yet so present self.
To reify her existence, I decided to write letters to myself, which soon became my first “art project”, so to speak.
Only after four years I realized that Agnes was me, or better, someone living within me. And the only way to express her was to become her, to give her life. A transformation needed to be happening. A hormone therapy had to be sought as a resolutive birth. But is this the most efficient and sustainable way to birth oneself?
AP: You talk a lot about your relationship with the sea and the aquatic environment in your work. Could you talk us through that unique link?
AQ: My father was a sailor and he raised me in his boat. I learned the names of fish and creatures of the sea before I even knew the names of writers or philosophers. You could say that my first school was the ‘school of the sea’. But I’ve always had a very different relationship with it than the one that my father had, which was more about controlling it. For me, it was a place of discovery, of research, of trying to understand myself through that liquid embodiment. I developed my virtual identity as squirming within the marine universe. Since the early stage of my life I felt I was part of the seascape. The first time I dived with the oxygen breather I questioned my humanness and its relation with the apparatus as a form of enhancement as well as its artificial detachment from my organs. In my work, I recreate a hybrid experience in which I am human, nonhuman, and machine at the same time.
Agnes Questionmark, TRANSGENESIS (2021). The Orange Garden & Harlesden High Street. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Henri Kisielewski.
Underwater is not my sole habitat. My work is research-based and is looking for potential transformations and adaptations. This idea of potentially living “elsewhere” and becoming a hybrid creature is a dire challenge to the future of human evolution, both scientifically and culturally, within political, social and economical structures.
AP: What about communicating with the sea creatures, what we call the interspecies communication?
AQ: When I met Neil Harbison in Barcelona, as well as other cyborgs and their community, I saw a possibility to communicate with other species. This was a great opportunity of allowing myself to become non-human. We worked together with a new dispositive outside the water but with the wish to make it watertight, and communicate with whales one day. My idea is to bring my new exo-sense, through a sort of helmet, with an echo location in my bones. Every time the echo sound bounces back, it will vibrate in my cheekbone. It will allow me to feel objects around as the vibration will change depending on the distance of the object perceived. My body will adapt to this new sense like we do with sounds. And that will make me a non-human, a cyborg.
I will never be able to understand other creatures’ languages, yet I can perceive them and feel their presence and existence through artificial modifications. My transformation doesn’t veer toward the enhancement of my health to seek immortality (like most transhumanists) but instead allows me to connect with nature and its planetary inhabitants (in this case whales or other marine mammals which posses echolocation). Having a new sense is not a selfish achievement, is not a skill to improve my “productive efficiency”, it is an act of resistance to overcome humanity’s race towards planetary domination. In this sense I do not consider myself “human” anymore. I do not enter in this destructive endeavours.
The world is adapting and changing and we need to find new tools and ways of communicating to survive among each-other. We cannot denigrate technological advances. We have to make it part of our ecology. Nature, technology, and the human being must coexist in symbiotic equality.
Agnes Questionmark, TRANSGENESIS (2021). The Orange Garden & Harlesden High Street. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Henri Kisielewski.
AP: And you are working on making it waterproof?
AQ: There’s a lab in California called Project Ceti which is not only able to perceive and translate whales’ languages, but they are trying to develop an AI that will talk back to them. Those artefacts and technologies will allow me, I believe, to enter into an interspecies trajectory. But for now, I will explore this activity outside the water because of expenses. To make it waterproof, I would need to collaborate with other institutions. That’s my ultimate goal.
AP: You have a post-humanist approach in your work. Could you talk us through the transformation of the human body and its relation to the non-human –which are your main field of artistic research.
AQ: Performing underwater is a gestational process, a moment where anything can happen and transform. It is also a place of death and transition, where survival instinct is called into action. Since I wanted to question my own humanness, I decided to create a situation in which I was in liminal gestational realm. There are some psychological theories, explaining that the ultimate goal of the human being is to return to the womb. I have this sort of obsession with the gestation, partially because the sea itself is a mother’s womb for everything and also the place of decaying and death. Everything has been developed from the sea and eventually that is the ultimate end. In my underwater performances I needed to recreate a situation in which I was the creature in gestation as well as in constant pain. Because in gestation you are not born yet, possibilities of becoming are infinite. It’s a sort of rebellion against answers, against the human as a fixated term. As I said earlier, I rather stick to the question. And in this case water becomes the questionmark in which I seek refuge, the amniotic liquid where a being is destined to be aborted.
In this transformative laboratory I ask myself what do I become? Is this creature moving? Does it communicate with other beings? Soon from being the creature I became my own scientist, working on an evolution in a hostile planet where humans murder each other and appropriate nature and its technological potentialities.
When I read Donna Haraway “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene” the octopus became the figure of motherhood which I needed to summon during my hormonal transition. I started to move from male to female, and had an urge for motherhood and femininity. The octopus, to me and to other thinkers, is a great figure of empowered femininity whom tentacles encompass it all. Through the tentacles it tastes. Mothers octopi are a figure of dedication. They dedicates themselves to the offspring until someday they die, leaving their offsprings eat their generatrix carcass. Like the octopus I die. As a martyr I become a symbol of transformation, adaptability, as well as of strength and survival.
Moving to New York and starting a course at the Pratt Institute, all of these symbols – the mother, the sea, the aquarium as a placenta, the transformation agency and potentiality embedded in our DNA – became real. Studying genome editing and the way scientists are trying to target DNA to shape and transform the evolution of creatures, such as Jo Zayner, an incredible scientist and artist researching on the application of genome editing in human and nonhuman cells, is constantly shaping my understanding of the body as organic matter able to shift and transmogrify. We can become each other. Today, I can see a tangible outcome of my work, which is not just speculative fiction but an actual reality.
Performativity is not just the theatrical representation of something, it is the actual change enacted in society. Words and actions have the power to change, and I believe that the performative power of my work is to shake society and make it change.
AP: Earlier you spoke about your transition and how you related to the octopus – Could you explain how the gender criteria have impacted and influenced your work ?
AQ: We must overcome binaries. These are the things that are embedded in my mind that I still need to fight. I have suffered a lot of transphobia because I was born in a patriarchal society - Italy - which put obstacles to induce you to fight against yourself. When I realised I could shift my gender and I was allowed to freely play with my identity, I gained the most strength in myself. Changing gender is something that anyone is allowed to do. Fluidity is inherently inside our DNA – our genome has multiple possible outcomes. Everyone holds the power of transformation and the best is that it never ends and it does not need to find a clear answer. Again, stick to the question. Once you realise that, everything changes, you understand your fluidity, your capability of adapting in any situation and transforming constantly.
Once you stop looking for answers, freedom emerges to help you understand that you are constantly evolving. When I started transitioning, I thought I was a woman. So I started to dress, act, speak, perform as a woman as Eurocentric society teaches you. It was so weird for me, because simply entering a woman’s bathroom, asking for a coffee, hooking up with someone, became a universal pressure - the one of being a woman constantly scrutinised by the male and colonial gaze. But I sort of went back, thinking I can also be a man and embrace my masculinity, alas! In a different way, which is now from my artificial female body. That’s the moment when artificiality and organicity splice together in a new form.
This applies to transforming yourself into a non-human creature as well. In my personal life, I play with my gender. In my work and research, I play with transgenic beings. I think we all can become something else if we allow ourselves to believe in it. Going under certain scientific experiments, you can create trans-species organisms and I think we should allow that to happen for a better society and a better understanding of the world.
AP: I wanted to talk about the mythology that surrounds sea creatures. Mythology used to be so important for ancient human civilizations. What is your opinion in that matter?
AQ: Facts often started from fiction. Mythology is always part of our reality. It seems like a contradiction because it’s fiction, but we live of fictional stories. Science, which is supposed to be what makes us believe - the objective- or often makes us question all that is mythology and religion, is actually shaped by mythological and fictional stories themselves. Dreaming and imagining new outcomes allowed scientists to take up experiments. Think about the first images of the moon, the possibility of aliens, of Mars. Suddenly, all the artists started to dream of other worlds, [which created] great Sci-Fi movies such as The Matrix or The Fifth Element. I read and watch a lot of science fiction, as well as reading scientific papers. Usually they are both connected.
One mythological creature that has inspired me as a transgender person is the mermaid. Mermaids are a childish figure and iconic symbol of hybridity– but still, they are so dark, controversial, half-human, half-fish, [their] gender identity is questionable, they are killers, hunters, they fool fishers and capture them. This is what transgender people are considered – as fooling ventriloquists. For me, the work at SpazioSERRA (Milan) “CHM13hTERT” was a celebration of the empowering figure of the mermaid, as a looming threat for normative society and binary thinking - socially, politically and scientifically.
Agnes Questionmark, CHM13hTERT (2023). Courtesy of the artist and SpazioSERRA.
AP: In Milan, I got the chance to see your performance CHM13 hTERT at SpazioSERRA in a metro station, what was the process of creating such incredible performance?
AQ: “CHM13” is the name of a cellular line that was developed in a lab to codify and hack the human genome code. “hTERT” comes from the technique to fully read a DNA chromosome. The telomere is the end of the DNA. CHM is the name of a malformation of the womb from which the cell was exported. CHM13 hTERT is the name of the multiple techniques that allowed scientists to “crack” the human genome. It was the first time in history that a full string of DNA was fully coded. There are billions of codes in the many DNA alleles, they’re so entangled and so complicated, that a human being is not able to do it alone. Hence the help of the machine. Scientists and medicine research companies are continuing to develop new softwares and devices to codify quicker and transmit new date to their database. The whole code could be written in more than one hundred books. One line will tell you how your eyebrow grows, or how your brain develops.
To target human and nonhuman DNA and infuse it with other organisms is to challenge the boundaries of nature by intervening artificially to its evolutionary course. Nothing wrong with it. All good for now. However, genetic experiments have long being in the hands of pharmaceutical companies to access to personal gene datas to fulfil their “GeneBanks”. You, as well as me, are being surveilled, reproduced and edited like assets on the market for a future tailored pill production.
People think the DNA is something you can’t touch. There are many genomes that are silent, sleeping, that you can actually activate. DNA changes mutate, depending on your lifestyle, environment, medicines. To give your DNA to multi-companies is to blindly agree to be shaped while your mind being manipulated. Why is natural reproduction and a normative lifestyle defended in the name of eugenics while silently you are studied and explored by unknown people in fragmented micro and macro labs?
Taking agency of your DNA as a malleable, changing matter is more suitable for a being in flux, freed from its economical restrained and political subjugation. To have rights on a common shared DNA and access to genome research results it will allow us to conduct a free life.
When my body started to transform under pharmaceutical therapy, I realised the potentiality of transformation. Instead of “reading” I must now write my own code. Genome editing and artificial placentas, are allowing scientists for developing new artificial gestational processes and transgenic fusions. [This] was connecting my scientific research with the experience of being a trans woman. When putting both together, I imagined a seven metres long creature suspended in a metal structure. It reflected how I felt as a trans person and a trans-species person – vulnerable, waiting for something, suspended in this medical equipment, surveilled and subjugated to an economic system that shapes the political regimes. It reflects all the injuries I went through by being a trans person. The wounds that I inflicted on my body and that society is constantly demanding to queer and minority communities.
Agnes Questionmark, CHM13hTERT (2023). Courtesy of the artist and SpazioSERRA.
AP: You perform for twelve hours over sixteen days, why did you do it for such a long period of time?
AQ: The metal structure from which I was suspended was inspired by medical equipment used to operate on horses and rehabilitate people to reuse their limbs or muscles. I did a research on medical equipment and came up with a new operational bed for the creature I was representing. The exhibition space, which shape and architecture recalled a greenhouse, at SpazioSERRA functioned as a lab or nursery room. It was a celebration of the birth of a hybrid creature, and passer-biers came to see its birth, becoming parents complicity bounded to that nursery room.
I decided to perform for twelve hours because, since I was in a train station, a place of transit, I needed to connect with commuter to their work. I wanted to stay there for [that long] so they could think of me and have that image of me being there for the whole working day. The performance become a proper “labour” in both its mechanical and organically production. It started on the 4th of May and finished on the 19th. I was always there. Whatever time you entered the station, you would have seen me. The space became my house. And the most question was: why?
The debates were fair enough. The audience turned into scientists and I gave them back the power agency of their criticism. They thought I could not hear so they bluntly gave their personal and most intimate reactions. This is my intention as an artist. To subvert the power control between the doctor and the patient. To make them question what they see, that they can shift their gazing power to the potentiality of transformation instead of delivering themselves and their most internal organic machinery to the economic regimes.
Agnes Questionmark, Falling in Water (2023). Centre d’art contemporain, Genève. Courtesy of the artist.
AP: Could you tell me a little about the new project you are working on? Where do you see your practice evolving to?
AQ: It would be good to share my upcoming project in New York. It’s going to be an exploration of the alien world, freed from any marine or morphological connotations; a world in which the “other” regains access and agency of its own life instead of being depicted as a monster to be defeated. This new concept is portrayed by reconstructing a habitat, a spacecraft from which there is no return.
Agnes Questionmark, Falling in Water (2023). Centre d’art contemporain, Genève. Courtesy of the artist.
Paul Preciado says in his book “An Apartment on Uranus”; that his transition never ends. The absence of gravity, of direction, of back and front, right and left, brings me to the idea of free-falling. Hito Steyerl says in her book that the “free fall” is a permanent state that we all live in, where there is no direction, and at last you have to jump in free fall. This destabilising step is crucial if we want to create new possible outcomes for a changing yet solid humanity. The new project is happening in September 2024.
AP: Do you have some hopes for the future you might want to share?
AQ: In the future I hope to have children. In the end, I wish to be a mother.
Agnes Questionmark, Falling in Water (2023). Centre d’art contemporain, Genève. Courtesy of the artist.
Agnes Questionmark, CHM13hTERT (2023). Courtesy of the artist and SpazioSERRA.