astronauts' 'agnes' bed reclaims histories of female agency

Astronauts traces histories of magic and femininity

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

Speaking with designboom, the Athens-based designer duo describes Agnes as rooted in the figure of Agnes Sampson, a Scottish healer executed for witchcraft, situating the project within a broader lineage where ‘midwives and female healers — bearers of empirical, embodied knowledge — were disproportionately targeted as witches.’

The sculptural, pink steel bed appears caught mid-shift, never fully arriving at a fixed state.‘The bed becomes a site of creation, desire, and condemnation, exploring the shift of procreation to hedonism that exposed deep cultural anxieties surrounding female sexual agency and autonomy,’ Astronauts tells us.

all images by Yiorgos Kaplanidis

Agnes bed resists fixed form through hydroformed steel

‘Agnes is definitely resisting a fixed form, both in production and concept,’ the designers explain, describing a process where control is continuously negotiated. Working with hydroforming, they use water to ‘inflate’ metal, allowing pressure to distort geometric shells into ‘expressive and voluptuous forms that depict tension and fluidity.’

What emerges is a body in flux. Curves stretch, surfaces ripple, and the frame seems to soften and harden at once, as if the bed were still becoming. In this way, the project challenges ‘preconceived notions of forms, balance, materialities, and in this case what a “bed” should look like,’ Astronauts adds, pushing the typology toward something more unstable, more alive.

Despite its shifting, almost creature-like presence, Agnes remains anchored in the idea of intimacy. ‘Beds are intimate spaces where one is meant to feel safe and free,’ the designers note, but here 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 of ‘persecuted femininities,’ Astronauts imagine the bed as a kind of refuge, ‘a nest where one could feel protected, similar to a hard shell of a sea creature.’ Its glossy, fleshy surfaces carry a subtle unease, yet this is deliberately counterbalanced. ‘The choice of pink was intentional to balance the unsettling forms with a color associated with our most tender of flesh,’ softening the object without resolving its ambiguity.

At the same time, the piece does not abandon its function. ‘Structurally the bed is sound and king-size,’ they add, grounding the work in the physical reality of use, before leaving its future open-ended. ‘All we can wish to whoever will be sleeping on it is sweet dreams — maybe get a notebook to write them the morning after,’ Danae Dasyra and Joe Bradford suggest.

Ultimately, Agnes is not passive. It behaves, almost, like a character moving through states. ‘She is wild, resilient and intuitive,’ Astronauts say, ‘in tune with her feelings and eroticism.’ Her identity is not fixed but shifting, ‘a rebel in flux, on the cusp of passing to become Margaret — the nurturing woman sitting in the rocking chair.’

This imagined transformation reframes the narratives embedded in the work, where ‘the power of sex, birth and healing is reclaimed as an enduring act of resistance.’ Within this continuum, the bed becomes a site where bodies, histories, and dreams are always becoming something else.

the bed was shot with model Terpsichore Khalil, a comment on the various ways femininity is persecuted through the ages