Growing up with a close connection to the sea through her father, a sailor, she recalls: “One day I was eight years old he gave me a little oxygen tank and said jump… you can go under the water (…) I still remember that was the strongest experience ever. It was a cathartic moment, very early age.” She began with underwater performances, breathing through a long hose, where physical strain informed her approach. “This underwater experience is both positive and negative… the two aspects in my performances.” In 2021, she undertook a 23-day performance, as mother octopus, TRANSGENESIS, taking hormones in real time. “As a queer person, we are deemed as monsters… I consider myself as a monster without really being able to fully be one.” Despite addressing gender and biopolitics, her work retains humor and beauty: “It’s not always a tragic, sad experience being trans. Yes, it’s quite tragic sometimes, but it’s also fin. We need to make it fun… we can make surgery fun… body modification beautiful.”

Agnes Questionmark (b. 1995, Rome) is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, sculpture, video, and installation. Her practice explores the limits of the body and the instability of identity through speculative genetic experiments, surgical interventions, and artificial reproductive processes. By placing herself and her audiences in spaces where conventional notions of humanity break down, she challenges the biopolitical norms surrounding transgender and transspecies bodies.

At the centre of the space stand three life-sized sculptures: hybrid beings, somewhere between aliens, mythological water figures and fish. Their blue exterior appears cool, their surface wet, as if they had just emerged from the water or had only just been born. For Agnes Questionmark, water is the primal site of transformation, the place of becoming and passing away—the oceans as the origin of all life, or the amniotic fluid of the womb. Her sculptures and installations embody hybrid figures that resist clear categorisation, oscillating between human and animal. Or like a seahorse, this extraordinary delicate water creature where it is the males who carry their young. What is strange, what is other, what society often regards as monstrous, becomes in Questionmark’s work an image of openness and possibility.