VANESSA ROCA FORNÉ








Never Neverland [2016-2024]
Text
Photos
Dummy
Installations



Tocar mare i fuig [2023-ong]
I. Enversada
II. Lo Delta






























About                                        

Never Neverland is a photographic project developed between 2016 and 2024, spanning ages 26 to 34. The images unfold in a constant transit between domestic and outdoor spaces, creating a tension between home and the open road, family and travel, crisis and desire. This body of work functions as a vehicle for exploring encounters and relationships, weaving a sensitive texture of experiences and creating folds within a reality that continuously transforms between youth and adulthood.

The project frames youth as a period of “biographical transition”, following the sociological paradigm defined by the Transitions Research Group at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB). This framework places the social actor as a historical subject and protagonist of their own life. In this sense, the transition is negotiated on both personal and collective levels, engaging with complexities that involve rational decision-making, emotions, and social and cultural constraints. As a result, youth emerges as a pathway to social positioning and the formation of class identity.

In response to the prolonged duration of this transition compared to previous generations, the project reflects how social changes have reshaped this experience. The images involve my immediate friends as a mirror to Spanish youth culture over the past decade, shaped by the financial instability of the 2010s. This period of turmoil paralleled their own transitions, offering a lens to examine genealogical patterns and the influence of patriarchy on emerging generations.

The work redefines transition as a continuous state, rather than a linear journey, where conflicts take shape through images that, in turn, function as spaces of resistance. It serves as a rite of passage, reframing my transition to adulthood—not just from one age to another, but from raw reality to self-fiction, stasis to movement, and from individual to collective identities. The photographic act becomes an exercise of openness, where what affects me— my affections, encounters and contradictions— shapes a visuality that constantly negotiates between social expectations and what one hopes or fears to leave behind. The images do not merely document this process but actively participate in it, transforming as they are traversed by the same conditions of transition they document.

Drawing from the fictional island created by J.M. Barrie in Peter and Wendy, where inhabitants are known for refusing to grow up, living without rules or responsibilities, and spending most of their time having fun or going on adventures, Never Neverland explores the complex transition from youth to adulthood in an uncertain world. The project presents this rite of passage as the visual search for a fictional boundary that provokes suspicion and raises essential questions: What does it mean to be young, and what defines adulthood? How do we negotiate this transition? Is there truly something to leave behind in this process?


In the images: Diana, Albert, Gráinne, Clara, Ana Maria, Celeste, Àlex, Carla, Dàmaris, Marta, Manuel, Basi, Borja, Max, Nil, Josep, myself, and a swan.