AGATHE SIMON
The Love of the Unknown

A conference-performance by artist-researcher Agathe Simon
60′, 2026

Photo credit: Sébastien Lemaire
Illustrative image: Agathe Simon during a presentation at the Sorbonne

Agathe Simon presents a one-hour lecture-performance centred on philagnosty, a term she coined to describe the love of the unknown. Drawing on her artistic practice and research conducted in extreme environments, she explores the unknown as both a creative process and a way of life.

From the Andes to the polar regions, from cosmology to non-human voices, Agathe Simon recounts three pivotal experiences that question different ways of approaching the unknown: representing it, interpreting it, and navigating it. At the intersection of art and science, philagnosty becomes a way of discovering, creating and inhabiting what eludes us.

Jean-Christophe Hamilton

A physicist and cosmologist at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), Jean-Christophe Hamilton explores the origins of the universe, where matter, space, and time emerge a few fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Trained at Paris-Saclay University and the Collège de France, he has worked on dark matter, dark energy, and primordial cosmology.

Starting in 2006, he became involved in developing a new way to observe the sky: bolometric interferometry. He is one of the key architects of the QUBIC instrument, designed to probe the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, and served as its scientific director for nearly twenty years.

Director of the APC laboratory since 2025, he simultaneously engages in active reflection on the transmission of knowledge and on the connections between scientific research, artistic creation, and the perception of the world. Jean-Christophe Hamilton describes himself as a “philagnostic,” a lover of knowledge that is built on momentum, doubt, and sharing.