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Agathe Snow, Walls, 2010

Just married
Agathe Snow was born in Corsica and spent her childhood surrounded by nature before moving to New York City in 1987 at the age of eleven. Her mother ran a restaurant in Manhattan. In 1999, Snow met her future husband, Dash Snow, who came from a well-known family of collectors.

The new downtown scene
At the time, the then eighteen-year-old was part of a group of graffiti artists on the Lower East Side and still completely unknown. That changed when the couple connected with people from the New York art scene. From this emerged an ambitious, rebellious clique including Dan Colen, Ryan McGinley, Dash, and Agathe Snow, even though her marriage soon ended in divorce. This new downtown scene, receiving enormous media attention, produced a hedonistic, unflinching body of work shaped in part by the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Dash Snow’s photographs depicted sex, drugs, violence, depression, and utter self-destruction—the simultaneously cynical and romantic lifestyle of young New York artists. He died of an overdose in 2009.

Dance marathon at Ground Zero
Snow, known for her large-scale, performative dinner events, became a star through a 48-hour dance marathon she organized in 2005, just four years after 9/11, in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum, two blocks from Ground Zero. It was both a farewell to the old days and a new beginning. “I invited all my friends,” Snow told Interview magazine. “It was a feeling of New York City after September 11—we didn’t know what was going to happen, we were all in downtown Manhattan, so we might as well have fun.” One cannot overestimate what the collapse of the Twin Towers, that landmark, meant at the time.

A world for everyone
This atmosphere of openness in the wake of an apocalypse was also embodied by All Access World, her first institutional solo exhibition in 2011 at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. Snow, who has no formal art training, transformed the Deutsche Bank exhibition hall into a laboratory for experimentation. On a massive, self-designed world map, she installed monuments—recreated or invented using found objects and building materials—sculptures reminiscent of Dada collage, performance art, and Arte Povera, yet expressed through the monumental formal language of columns, obelisks, towers, triangular gables, pyramids, spires, and domes. The sculptures were fitted with casters and could be moved around like elements on a user interface. To complement this, she created large-format collages featuring famous buildings and logos. On Walls, for example, the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall are brought together.

Selfies in front of tourist attractions
This colorful vision of an open, global civilization free of nationalism, monuments, and war memorials, where everyone has access to culture, consumer goods, and community, and where individuals can fulfill their potential and shape their own world, may seem almost naive today. Yet it emerged while Barack Obama was in office in the United States, amid the air of hope for a new era. Back when the Internet still meant connection, people posted photos of their meals and selfies in front of tourist attractions, Facebook was booming, and Instagram was still in its infancy. And there was that very real political optimism of the time, something one might smile at, but shouldn’t forget.