The Body Issue: Esmay Wagemans on Visibility in an AI Era
The material researcher shares what casting skin has taught her about the body’s limits in fashion.
Amsterdam-based artist and material researcher Esmay Wagemans operates at the intersection of fashion, technology and the body. Casting and molding by hand, she shapes silicone, resin and composite materials into wearable art grounded in feminist and posthumanist thought.
“I experience the body more as a carrier of memory, fear, desire, politics and time,” she tells us when asked about how her relationship to the body has changed. Known for material innovation practices, Wagemans turns live casting into a way of questioning what a body is, work that’s landed on Solange, Rosalía and Sevdaliza.
For The Body Issue, she shares how algorithmic systems are changing who gets seen online, and how body experimentation can be used as both a design and a political tool.
Read on for the full interview.
How has your work around bodily material and imagery changed since when you first started?
When I first started working with the body, I was very interested in transformation and the idea of the body as something that could be reimagined. At university, I was looking a lot at cyborg theory, posthumanism and the relationship between fashion and identity. Now, I’m more aware of the systems around the body: who gets censored, who gets turned into an aesthetic and how technology influences that process. I also relate to the body less as a perfect image and more as something temporary and constantly changing. I experience the body more as a carrier of memory, fear, desire, politics and time. In my work, I try to hold both sides together: the body as something futuristic and speculative, but also as something very human, fragile and part of today’s world.
With people’s relationship to their body being increasingly mediated through a front-facing camera or static image, how have you seen self-image change?
What’s changed is how people relate to seeing their body without control over its position. Normally you see yourself in a mirror already posed, because you’re standing how you expect to be seen. My molding practice takes so long that at some point your body settles into a relaxed state you can’t feel or control, since the material is heavy on top of you. That relaxed face and posture is often what people dislike most about seeing themselves.
This has gotten harder now because people carry an online presence so different from the real version of their body. On social media you build an image and hold it for a few seconds, then that becomes the version you’re used to. You usually only know your own face through a flat, mirrored reflection. A moulding cast lets you see it all at once, from every angle, which is a new way of encountering yourself which can be uncomfortable.
What do you think fashion’s current obsession with skin and prosthetics says about the relationship between fashion and the body right now?
The relationship between fashion, prosthetics and questioning the limits of the body has been explored for a long time, but often in more niche contexts. Now, Fashion is no longer only interested in dressing the body, but also in altering, extending, duplicating or replacing it. When you start questioning the body, you almost automatically enter the territory of transformation, of imagining what else a body could be.
This is also connected to the way we experience the body through digital culture. Our bodies have become part of how we perform identity online; they are constantly experienced through image. We live in a very individualistic moment, where self-expression, self-development and identity are extremely foregrounded. That creates a stronger desire to use the body as a site of experimentation. [Experimentation] can be very powerful when it opens up space for more fluid, hybrid or non-normative bodies.
What can you tell us about your Body Politics piece with Sevdaliza?
Body Politics was a collaboration with Sevdaliza that came from a shared interest in the body as a political and symbolic space. At the time, her body received a lot of criticism because it did not fit within the narrow idea of how a woman’s body was supposed to look. With Body Politics, the intention was to push it further and to amplify the parts that were being criticized. It was a way of confronting the idea that femininity has to be small, soft and delicate. The timing was right because themes around the female body being judged, sexualized and politicized were very present at that moment.
What does fashion reveal about how we value the body and how do you think algorithms and screen time have impacted this perception?
Fashion reveals how much value we place on the body as an image. It constantly reflects what kind of bodies are considered desirable, powerful or acceptable at a certain moment in time. Algorithms have intensified this by repeating and ranking images. They create feedback loops around what is considered relevant or visible. Because of that, the body becomes increasingly shaped by what performs well on a screen.
This has made our relationship to the body more fragmented. On one hand, there is more visibility for different identities. On the other hand, there is also more pressure to become legible within a visual system: to have a body, face or style that can be understood quickly, shared easily and categorized by platforms.
Is there still space for fully digital bodies in fashion campaigns or will be head towards hybridization?
The fully digital body had a very specific moment, especially when virtual influencers and digital fashion were being presented as the future. But after a while, people started craving something more soulful, imperfect and emotionally present again. For me, the most interesting space is between the physical and the digital. I like when you cannot immediately tell where one ends and the other begins. This hybrid space is also more honest to how we live now. The digital body hasn’t disappeared; it became more embedded. It’s about how digital logic and spaces are shaping the way we understand real bodies.
