Interview: Sally Montes
Luca Curci talks with Sally Montes during ANIMA MUNDI – VISIONS 2026, at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello in Venice.

Sally Montes explores the abstraction of data and information – whether material or immaterial – as a tool for driving social change. Her practice frequently engages with endangered languages and investigates novel methods of covertly circulating information.

Luca Curci – What is art for you?
Sally Montes – Art is a tool for cracking the code of reality. Not metaphorically – literally. Every work I make is an attempt to find the gesture, the image, the feeling, the form that makes something previously invisible suddenly undeniable. It’s also a practice of radical attention. In a world optimized for distraction, choosing to look slowly at something – really look – is already a radical act. Art is where I go to do that, and to invite others in.

LC – What’s your background? What experience influenced your work the most?
SM – I trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam – a school where you could move freely between disciplines and workshop departments. That porousness shaped how I think about everything.
While I was there, I curated an independent student event at Documenta 13. Through that, I met the feminist artist Robin Kahn, and from that experience I learned so much – spending time with her and her work The Art of Sahrawi Cooking (dOCUMENTA 13, 2012). It’s been expanding ever since: performance, photography, video, installation, design objects, design architecture, sculpture, fashion, curating, and, most recently, back to painting.

LC – Where do you find your inspiration?
SM – In the gap between what something appears to be and what it’s actually doing. That gap is where everything interesting lives. I’m drawn to systems – scientific, linguistic, social, philosophical, esoteric – that propose a structure for reality. I research utopian communities, communication, codes and decoding, and ways of operating that slip through the cracks of what’s been officially agreed upon. Inspiration isn’t a moment – it’s a practice of staying genuinely curious.

LC – How important is the editing process in your work? How’s yours?
SM – Editing is where the work tells me what it actually is. I arrive with a question and leave with a different, better one. That gap between intention, intuition, and revealing – that’s where the work happens. With FUERZAS INVISIBLES, the starting point was presence: slow breathing, closeness, tenderness – an expectation of conflict that instead became tender care. But then I became obsessed with the lucha libre keys – las llaves. Stripped of their combat context, they look like architectural forms. I started renaming them: Axis of Gravity, Scale, Stairs. These aren’t fighting techniques anymore – they’re the construction of form, and as keys, they open doors. What appeared to be conflict, the bodies moved through with impossible softness, revealing tender care. That inversion is the whole work.

LC – What do you think about art on social media? Are they becoming new showcases for contemporary art?
SM – Social media gave visibility to artists who would never have had it otherwise. That’s genuinely historic, and I don’t take it lightly – in that sense it has been helpful. At the same time, I’m watching it reshape what art gets made. In recent years I’ve watched major art productions designed primarily as selfie spots – elaborate installations built to be photographed. For me it remains a tool – I still use it. But as a research platform, not a mirror.

LC – Which art themes do you pursue? What is your preferred subject, if there is any?
SM – Experimentation is the only honest method, guided by research. I’ve long been fascinated by the visionaries who dared to propose that another reality is possible. The idea that how you position yourself in the world is already a sculptural act. Utopian propositions – not as escapism but as method. What would it actually take for a radical idea to survive contact with reality? I don’t want to only propose a possibility. I want to inhabit it.

LC – How is being an artist nowadays?
SM – It requires building an entirely parallel world. The existing structures – markets, institutions, hierarchies – are shifting fast, and the space that opens up is real. You construct it – the relationships, the contexts, the conditions that make the work possible. I carry multiple roles simultaneously – artist, researcher, curator, producer, designer, writer, director. But artists need to go and make work. That’s what leads to new worlds.

LC – Your last artistic production attracted us. Has the artwork presented been created for the exhibition or as a part of preexisting works?
SM – FUERZAS INVISIBLES originated as a live performance at Y Museum during Art Week Mexico City 2026, as part of the group exhibition Quarks in Space, curated by Maria Marshall. I worked with a choreographer and the performers to develop a movement language from lucha libre. The photographs presented at VISIONS were selected and produced for the exhibition due to the specifications of the exhibition space and the conditions of travel. They’re simultaneously documentation and autonomous works – the trace of a live event that now stands completely on its own as a representation of the keys that build form.

LC – How did you get to your current artistic practice?
SM – Curiosity became a method. Research into material, forms, structures, and meaning. Into utopian structures, languages, codes – it all asks the same thing: what does an idea do when the official channel is closed?

LC – Do you agree with our vision of art, and what do you think about the theme of the exhibition?
SM – VISIONS is exactly the right word for what I’m trying to do – and I don’t mean vision as metaphor. I mean the literal expansion of what we can perceive when encountering so many different lenses and perspectives on a single question. Different voices from different backgrounds make the visions kaleidoscope interesting. That’s why I’m here.