Ian Mont

Ian Mont (Yamil Rodríguez Montaña, Cuba, 1972; Spanish nationality) is a visual artist and researcher based in Barcelona. He works in photography, installation, and archival research. His practice examines forced displacement, historical memory, and the contemporary Mediterranean as a space of disappearance.

He trained in photography at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and left Cuba in 2006. Fifteen years of work, including seven solo exhibitions, remained on the island and were lost. He arrived in Catalonia undocumented, worked as a software engineer, and with his first paycheck bought a camera. Between 2007 and 2018 he built an extensive, unexhibited archive: the Catalan coast from end to end, migrant communities in cities and towns, and the food of the country that had taken him in. The apparent silence of that decadence was not an absence of work but an absence of circuit.

I was born in a coastal town as picturesque as it is irrelevant. Puerto Padre, Cuba. They say Columbus landed around there. I doubt it. The only thing landing there now is raft wreckage and drifting hope. At eight years old, during the Mariel exodus, I learned that the sea isn't turquoise blue; it's a landfill of bodies with waves. My first lesson in geopolitics was that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to the ocean.

In the 90s, during the balsero crisis, I repeated the class. This time, it was on a grand scale. The entire country playing Russian roulette with the Florida Straits. Me, from the shore, a front-row spectator to a reality show where the contestants drowned live on CNN's prime time. Stellar production.

Art must stand with those who have no voice, no papers, no tomb. It sounds like an NGO slogan, I know. But slogans exist because reality is repetitive shit. The dead don't give a damn about rhetorical originality.

I am not a politically committed artist. I am an accountant of corpses with degrees in art and engineering and a whole lot of resentment. Also with the immense guilt of having survived while so many lost their lives. I know the difference between crossing a border with a Schengen visa and crossing it on a ...