ITALY - JAPAN - USA
Featured Work
Complexion/Dark
New Media mobile exhibition from Daniel & Ocean Di Monte consisting of film, installation, photography, print media, collage, music, and performing arts. We are an Italian / American husband and wife team of digital media producers, ethnographers, interdisciplinary artists, curators, philanthropists, and cultural investigators living and loving on three continents.
“To propel our cultures into the future seems no easy task, but even the early brushstrokes can become a life’s worth of possibilities.”
Complexion/Dark is a new media mobile art exhibition commenting on the intimate relationship between the self and sight by exploring relationships among culture, community, media, architecture, history and public institutions. A real-time work in progress presented by STUDIO DI MONTE, the work aims to expose the colonial influence on the dissemination of information in social and education systems, while contemplating the fundamental acts of learning to name, compare, and valuate in cultivating our identities and perceptions.
As dreamers, time travelers, and interdisciplinary artists working in film, sound, sculptural installation and photography, we focus on loosening the exertion of power on ourselves and the landscapes we reside in. In and through our practice, we do this by investigating materiality—the rare connections between Abruzzese Italian, Louisiana Creole, and other Indigenous cultures and the dissemination of information in social and educational spaces.
Our practice is heavily influenced by the ecological and social landscapes of Abruzzo, Italy and Acadiana, Louisiana; the respective birthplaces of our families and where deep roots remain today. As we have recovered both literal and figurative ‘maps’ to help us navigate these geographies and orient ourselves in their histories, so have we learned that maps also come with an agenda. As much as they can reveal about a place or idea, maps also have the power to hide or distort historical truths. We use this acquired sensibility, ancestral memory, and an insatiable desire to dig deep into our curiosities to counter the often dehumanizing effects of our global societal polarization—anchoring this process through contemporary art scholarship.
The history of Afro-Indigenous people in the Americas is often distorted and remains a powerful destructive force leveraged against Afro-descendants to separate them from their Indigenous origins within society. Yet there are many people with this intersecting identity who are deeply invested in both communities today; people who have always contemplated their origins in the same breath that they anticipated the fate of humankind. Governments and organizations proclaiming a commitment to realizing the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 must simultaneously be in the enterprise of building new international standards that prioritize permanent civil and human rights advances for those historically omitted from the conversation.
The experience offered by the Complexion/Dark exhibition at Expo 2025 Osaka, Japan (scheduled April 13 - October 13, 2025) will serve as a unique opportunity for Japanese citizens and the international community to encounter rare histories through site-responsive art, design, and programming, and engage with the present-day social and economic momentum of Abruzzese communities in Central Italy, Louisiana Creole communities in the Southern United States, and Hokkaido Ainu communities in Northern Japan. This approach to living and experiencing reality through intersectional time orientation—being in the present and seeing into possible futures without being cut off from the past—can have a profound influence over who we are and who we become at a future point. Transforming cycles of experience through artistic methods derived from Indigenous cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space is one way to help the contemporary world endeavor to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
The mobile installation will feature a series of photographs incorporated into a ‘light box sculpture’ consisting of domestic lighting techniques (E.g. antique ceiling fixtures, chandeliers, table lamps, and ring lights from our homes and travels) positioned alongside films, books, sound recordings, cartoons, newspaper archives, census records, motion graphics and other interactive media. These elements—changing and morphing—can be related to Niels Bohr’s philosophy physics. Here, we seek to highlight the importance of challenging representational structures by critiquing ‘learned perspectives’ born of early childhood environments, reinforced social norms, institutional power structures, hegemonic education, and classroom symbols. Our symbols only have their structure and outcomes because our cultures have ascribed such to them.
In 2025, the world will be a mere five years away from 2030, the year the United Nations has set as the target for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The urgency of this global moment calls for urgency in how we walk alongside and support those who have been excluded from participating in the contemporary world. Making Japan’s ‘Society 5.0’ the host venue for our efforts, we challenge everyone to make practical commitments to restorative investment in communities where embedded systems of power continue to threaten the survival of their languages, art forms and communal traditions.
Within this context, how then can contemporary art scholarship, the complexities of sustainability, and philanthropic systems at a distance from lived realities be re-imagined in a way that helps communities out of crisis?
Complexion/Dark can also be understood in the context of directional consciousness, a primary feature of the “Hokkaido Ainu” language spoken by the Indigenous people of Northern Japan; which communicates in a network of human relationships without the ‘self’ becoming an autonomous entity. Matter exists with and without our culture and involvement—self is never lost—and a greater intimacy with the surroundings is possible. Languages evolve over space and time. Spatial and temporal aspects of language evolution are particularly crucial for understanding demographic history, as they allow us to identify when and where the languages originated, as well as how they spread across the globe.
What was a time you felt the power of community so viscerally that you had no choice but to stop and be enveloped by its presence?
As a sustainable media production company, STUDIO DI MONTE aims to connect its art spaces to global communities and assemble new community in these spaces. Through field documentation, dialogue circles, and academic knowledge exchanges, the objective is to remove the hierarchy of self, space, and objects in real-time. Recognizing our own agency and organizing power is central to advancing international solidarity towards a more just society. Therefore, we are committed to investing in collaborative efforts worldwide and supporting practitioners doing the work where they are right now.
Knowledge and education are byproducts of culture, but what could new perceptions of discovery and learning, in the depths of our infinite matter, create and uncover now and into the future?
7 Sustainable Development Goals that align with STUDIO DI MONTE’s impact investment themes:
4-Quality Education: Promoting, supporting, and delivering well-documented cultural education on the Abruzzese, Louisiana Creole, and Indigenous experiences.
5-Gender Equality: Partnering with women-led cultural organizations and encouraging greater uptake of their research dissemination and programs that center international solidarity, land independence, and language and culture preservation efforts.
9-Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure: We facilitate cultural investigation and arts innovation through our three studios in Europe, Asia, and North America; helping to future-proof arts, language, heritage, and culture education and social spaces for the groups we feel most accountable to.
10-Reduced Inequalities: We work to a vision of targeting upstream over downstream interventions for the communities we serve—emphasizing language and culture preservation and permanent access to land rights, infrastructure, and resources.
11-Sustainable Cities and Communities: We promote and facilitate economic, social and environmental projects through our ongoing sustainable innovation in the arts, partnerships, space-making, and infrastructural investments in Italy, Japan and the US.
12-Responsible Consumption and Production: We support responsible management of natural resources through ecological research, production practices, technologies, products and services to reduce the industry’s environmental impact.
17-Partnerships For The Goals: We work in partnership with other organizations and share learning through transnational projects, workshops, conferences and connections to cultural spaces centered on Abruzzese, Louisiana Creole and Indigenous affairs.
We will be sharing updates on this project via our blog, along with related reading, viewing and listening recommendations below. Contact us at info[at]studio-dimonte.com if you are interested in our work or have a space to offer to support the project.
SOUNDS OF THE LOUISIANA CREOLE DIASPORA:
La Nation Créole on 88.7FM KRVS Radio Acadie: From Louisiana to Haiti, the French Antilles, and the Indian Ocean; join Grammy-nominated Creole musician, Cedric Watson, on a musical tour around the Creole French-speaking world. Sundays at 4:00 p.m. Central Time (Louisiana, USA).
BOOKS THAT CONTINUE TO INFORM AND INSPIRE:
An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T. Mays (Beacon Press, 2021)
Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera (Viking Penguin, 2021)
Are Italians White? How Race Is Made In America by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (Routledge, 2003)
African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? by Reginald Kearney (State University of New York Press, 1998)
Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, The Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic by Erika Denise Edwards (University of Alabama Press, 2020)
A Great Conspiracy Against Our Race: Italian Immigrant Newspapers and the Construction of Whiteness in the Early 20th Century by Peter G. Vellon (New York University Press, 2014)
Daniel & Ocean Di Monte
Artist Statement
We are a husband and wife team of digital media producers, ethnographers, interdisciplinary artists, curators, philanthropists and cultural investigators living and loving on three continents. Each of us being of Italian and Afro-Indigenous American descent, respectively, our deep love of nature, cinema, history, Indigenous & Diasporic Futurisms, music and literature are central themes in our work.
We continue to live in a ‘post-colonial’ world - in the glow of the multiple empires that came, went and remain. Our material work manifests in films, sounds, photographs and sculptural installations that speak to the elements of community—both in its most inviting and isolating—and explore the dynamic ways that people relate to one another within a planet-sized social drama. We are constantly imagining and creating new work steeped in intercultural traditions of collection, recovery, preservation, transmission and development; building knowledge communities that foster ethical collaboration across institutions and geographies.
The way technology and our world functions, we receive and share more information than ever before that affirms our interests, beliefs, values, and thoughts. Through our practice, we examine rigid habits and the parasitic roots of power that exist in interactions with oneself, each other, and the landscapes we occupy. We look intently at systems of standardization that are employed to exert control over time, space and matter; while simultaneously exposing the embodiment of these systems through the dissemination of information in the home, early learning spaces, and public life.
The current work in progress presented by STUDIO DI MONTE titled ‘Complexion/Dark’ aims to challenge our development of perception through the learning of classification and naming. By examining the dynamics of ethnic and cultural identification as a critical subject globally, we focus on the visceral ramifications of losing one’s connection to their art, culture, and linguistic traditions in adapting to the colonial structures that make up the ‘contemporary world.’
We were both conditioned to think within the clearly divided boxes of education, race, and ethnicity surveys growing up in North America. The passive indoctrination and assimilation we experienced into the contemporary world highlights the intersecting histories of the African and Italian Diasporas in the Americas. We learned to function within these fixed parameters of ‘black’ and ‘white,’ designed to continue the propagation of colonial thought, policies, and behaviors; slowly watching the connections to our childhood dialects (Abruzzese and Kouri-Vini), games, family traditions and ideas begin to fade.
For historical context, the collision between the African and Italian Diasporas at the intersection of race, politics, and media in the Americas can be traced back to Louis Dalrymple’s 1903 editorial cartoon titled ‘The Unrestricted Dumping-Ground,’ published by Judge Magazine in New York. In the cartoon, Italian immigrants are depicted as dark-skinned, half-human, half-rodent creatures wearing bandanas and hats labeled ‘Mafia’ and ‘Anarchist’ and ‘Socialist.’ In response to these dehumanizing characterizations by the American press, Italian immigrant newspapers defended their co-nationals by distancing Italians from other ethnic and racial minorities: Asians, Native Americans, and above all, African Americans.
Now 120 years later, it is still quite clear how different groups establish their bona fides as first-class citizens globally through similar tactics. Attitudes become policy, policy becomes law, and law changes lives for the better or for worse. Hence, the reason that a work like ‘Complexion/Dark’ remains relevant today. It is critical that we continue to innovative, build global connections, and express creatively within international forums. In bringing our whole selves to the public space, engaging critically with historical texts in different languages, documenting cooperatively, and listening closely to the unique concerns of contemporary ethnic communities, we strive to develop more informed and meaningful work within a context of transnational partnership.
To come into relationship and stay in relationship with people under these circumstances, with so much politically-packed, imbalanced history playing out today, we have been very intentional about drawing a line in the sand about what the world will ‘say’ versus what actually ‘is.’ And by actively bringing into our conscious thoughts the visual markers of power, we seek to unmake sets of micro-habit and reconcile with our histories; therein forming a renewed relationship with the environments we occupy.
