Astronauts' 'agnes' bed recovers stories of female agency

Astronauts trace stories of magic and femininity

Designed by Danae Dasyra and Astronauts’ Joe Bradford, Agnes’ presence is suspended somewhere in between dreamritual and resistance. Part of the Goetia series presented at Nilufar Gallery during Milan Design Week 2026, the piece explores magic, drawing on the long, charged histories of femininity that continue to shape the present.

Talking to designboomthe Athens-based design duo describes Agnes as rooted in the figure of Agnes Sampson, a Scottish healer executed for witchcraft, placing the work in a wider lineage where “Midwives and female healers — carriers of experiential, embodied knowledge — were disproportionately targeted as witches.”

the sculpture, pink steel The bed seems caught in the shift, never fully reaching a steady state.“The bed becomes a site of creation, desire and condemnation, exploring the turn of procreation into hedonism that exposed deep cultural anxieties around female sexual agency and autonomy.” Astronauts tell us.

all images from Yiorgos Kaplanidis

The Agnes bed resists the fixed form through the hydroformed steel

“Agnes certainly resists a fixed format, both in production and concept.” the designers explain, describing a process where control is constantly negotiated. Working with hydroforming, they use water to ‘inflate’ metal, allowing pressure to deform the geometric shells “expressive and voluptuous forms depicting tension and fluidity”.

What results is a body in flux. Curves stretch, surfaces undulate, and the frame seems to soften and harden at once, as if the bed were still being made. In this way, the work provokes “preconceived notions of forms, balance, materiality and in this case what a ‘bed’ should look like; Astronauts add, pushing the typology towards something more unstable, more alive.

Despite her shifting, almost creature-like presence, Agnes remains anchored to the idea of intimacy. “Beds are intimate spaces where one should feel safe and free.” designers note, but here the comfort is not immediate or obvious. Instead, it is constructed through tension.

the Athens-based studio explores femininity, intimacy and resistance through the sculptural bed

intimacy, transformation and dreams

thinking “persecuted femininities”, Astronauts imagine the bed as a kind of shelter, “a nest where one could feel protected, similar to a sea creature’s hard shell.” Its glossy, fleshy surfaces carry a subtle uneasiness, but this is deliberately offset. “The choice of pink was deliberate to balance the disturbing forms with a color associated with our more tender flesh.” softening the object without resolving its ambiguity.

At the same time, the piece does not give up its function. “Structurally the bed is firm and king-size,” add, grounding the project in the physical reality of use, before leaving its future open. “All we can wish for whoever sleeps on it is sweet dreams — maybe we’ll get a notebook to write them down the next morning.” Danae Dasyra and Joe Bradford suggest.

After all, Agnes is not passive. He acts, almost, like a character moving through situations. “She’s fierce, resilient and intuitive,” astronauts say, “in harmony with her feelings and eroticism”. Her identity is not fixed but changing, “a revolutionary in flux, on the cusp of becoming Margaret — the nursing woman in the rocking chair.”

This fictional transformation reframes the narratives embedded in the work, where “The power of sex, birth and healing is reclaimed as an ongoing act of resistance.” Within this continuum, the bed becomes a space where bodies, stories, and dreams always become something else.

The bed was shot with model Terpsichore Khalil, a commentary on the various ways femininity has been persecuted throughout the ages