There is No Such Thing as Youth

Since 2022, after returning to Belluno, I have been observing and photographing a group of adolescents who spend time along rivers, lakes, and marginal natural spaces of the province. What began as an experiment with my students gradually became a long-term portrait project and an archive of time. The project originated from a sentence spoken by one of my students: “There is no such thing as youth anymore.” She was not denying adolescence itself, but the idea of youth as a cohesive social group. Online cultures fragment young people into countless micro-communities, interests, and identities, yet this apparent diversity often produces a subtle form of uniformity. Difference multiplies, while experience flattens. Through repeated encounters with the same subjects, photography becomes slow and close. Gestures, postures, and minor details turn into traces of transition and presence. The adolescents inhabit landscapes altered by environmental change or neglect, transforming them into quiet spaces of everyday life. Rather than documenting events, the work observes a condition: a silent tension between bodies and territory, between fragmentation and sameness, between what changes and what persists.