Astronauts traces histories of magic and womanhood
Developed by Danae Dasyra and Joe Bradford of Astronauts, Agnes’ existence is suspended somewhere between dream, routine, and resistance. Part of their Goetia series presented at Nilufar Gallery throughout Milan Design Week 2026, the piece explores magic, drawing from the long, charged histories of femininity that continue to form today.
Talking to designboom, the Athens-based designer duo explains Agnes as rooted in the figure of Agnes Sampson, a Scottish healer executed for witchcraft, situating the task within a wider lineage where ‘midwives and female healers– bearers of empirical, embodied knowledge– were disproportionately targeted as witches.’
The sculptural, pink steel bed appears captured mid-shift, never fully coming to a set state.‘The bed becomes a website of development, desire, and condemnation, exploring the shift of procreation to hedonism that exposed deep cultural stress and anxieties surrounding female sexual firm and autonomy,’ Astronauts informs us.
all images by Yiorgos Kaplanidis Agnes bed withstands fixed form through hydroformed steel’Agnes is absolutely resisting a set type, both in production and principle, ‘the designers describe, explaining a process where control is continuously negotiated. Dealing with hydroforming, they use water to ‘pump up’metal, permitting pressure to distort geometric shells into ‘meaningful and voluptuous forms that portray tension and fluidity.’
What emerges is a body in flux. Curves extend, surface areas ripple, and the frame seems to soften and harden simultaneously, as if the bed were still ending up being. In this way, the task challenges ‘preconceived notions of forms, balance, materialities, and in this case what a “bed” ought to look like,’ Astronauts includes, pushing the typology toward something more unsteady, more alive.
Regardless of its moving, nearly creature-like presence, Agnes remains anchored in the idea of intimacy. ‘Beds make love spaces where one is suggested to feel safe and complimentary,’ the designers keep in mind, but here convenience is not immediate or obvious. instead, it is built through tension.
the Athens-based studio explores femininity, intimacy, and resistance through the sculptural bed intimacy, change, and dreams Thinking about’persecuted femininities,’Astronauts imagine the bed as a type of haven,’ a nest where one could feel secured, similar to a difficult shell of a sea animal.’Its glossy, fleshy surfaces carry a subtle worry, yet this is deliberately reversed. ‘The choice of pink was intentional to balance the disturbing forms with a color related to our many tender of flesh,’ softening the things without resolving its ambiguity.
At the very same time, the piece does not desert 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 compose them the early morning after,’ Danae Dasyra and Joe Bradford recommend.
Eventually, Agnes is not passive. It acts, practically, like a character moving through states. ‘She is wild, durable and intuitive,’ Astronauts state, ‘in tune with her feelings and eroticism.’ Her identity is not fixed but shifting, ‘a rebel in flux, on the cusp of passing to end up being Margaret– the supporting lady sitting in the rocking chair.’
This pictured transformation reframes the stories embedded in the work, where ‘the power of sex, birth and healing is recovered as an enduring act of resistance.’ Within this continuum, the bed ends up being a site where bodies, histories, and dreams are always ending up being something else.
the bed was shot with design Terpsichore Khalil, a comment on the various methods womanhood is persecuted through the ages Agnes exists as part of the Goetia series at Nilufar Gallery throughout Milan Design Week 2026 Astronauts imagines Agnes as a dreamlike sanctuary powder-coated steel stretches into expressive, creature-like kinds< img src=" image/gif; base64, R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP/// yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7"alt="astronauts reclaims histories of female company through hydroformed'agnes' bed-7" width= "818"height="1091"data-src=" https://static.designboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/astronauts-histories-female-agency-hydroformed-agnes-bed-milan-design-week-2026-interview-designboom-06.jpg"/ > reflective surface areas and fleshy pink tones balance softness with subtle worry curling legs and distorted geometries push the domestic typology towards something more alive
shiny hydroformed details stimulate stress sculptural metallic types curve around the body
Margaret rocking chair
Danae Dasyra and Joe Bradford of Astronauts together with their sculptural Agnes bed
project information
:
name: Agnes
designers: Astronauts|@madebyastronauts
lead designers: Danae Dasyra|@danaedasyra & Joe Bradford
collection: Goetia
measurements: 210 × 260 × H 120 cm
exhibit: Casa Magica, Nilufar Gallery
event: Milan Design Week 2026
photographer: Yiorgos Kaplanidis|@kaplanidis