Ian Mont
Visual artist and researcher
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 decade was not an absence of work but an absence of circuit.
He left the tech sector in 2024 to devote himself full-time to his work as an artist. In 2026 he completed the International Master in Contemporary Photography of PhotoESPAÑA and EFTI with the installation Drift, and has developed his own research framework on death, disappearance, and territory in contexts of forced migration, published as the essay Geothanatology (2025) and expanded in the ongoing manifesto Exclucentrism (2026).
