LOCATION: Outdoor exhibition by the theater playground. MAP
In The Golden Amphibian, Mexican photographer Fernando Montiel Klint combines documentary photography, studio still life, and digitally altered images to create an imagined space where observation and imagination intersect. The project grew from a sense of disconnection from nature, as animals and plants that once felt familiar had become distant and strange.
Seeking to reconnect, Montiel Klint began photographing plants, flowers, fruits, and animals with renewed curiosity and care. His subjects include primates, axolotls, frogs, birds, and scientific specimens, photographed both in the wild and in controlled environments such as zoos and laboratories. Across these settings, nature appears increasingly shaped by human presence.
Animals in his images exist in a state of tension—partly natural, partly altered by science, domestication, or technology. A Sphynx cat, with its exposed skin, feels at once intimate and alien. Other works reveal unexpected scientific realities, such as a close-up of a Petri dish containing Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacterium capable of breaking down plastic and transforming human waste into nourishment.
Landscapes and portraits of people, including a traditional Mexican rain dancer, evoke spirituality and ancestral connections to the natural world, pointing to a time of closer human–nature coexistence. In contrast, still-life photographs of discarded plastics highlight the lasting traces of human consumption.
Together, the works explore transformation, adaptation, and coexistence, inviting viewers to slow down, look closely, and imagine new ways in which humans, animals, plants, and technologies might live together in a more attentive and caring balance.
Fernando Montiel Klint is a visual artist based in Mexico city. His work is held in inter-national collections including the Wittliff Collection and Guangdong Museum of Art and has been widely exhibited at institutions and festivals including Les Rencontres d’Arles, PhotoEspaña and Athens Photography Festival.
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