We Are 17
By Charlotte Stace
The CCCB’s latest exhibition We are seventeen: A collective portrait is built from the voices (and images) of teenagers themselves. More than 300 young people explore what it means to be seventeen today through photography, film and first-person texts. It’s welcomed as a refreshingly direct counterpoint to the clichés adults often project onto adolescence.
It focuses on everyday places, friendships, emotions and anxieties, inviting you into the “immediate surroundings” of its participants. The aim is simple: let teenagers represent themselves on their own terms - messy, funny, tender, political, uncertain - without the usual coming-of-age packaging.
It’s inspired by filmmaker Johan van der Keuken, who photographed his friends at seventeen in 1955; those portraits are shown in Barcelona for the first time in dialogue with the contemporary work. The project was developed over two years via workshops with schools in Catalunya, Lithuania and Romania, led by the arts education association A Bao A Qu with a team of artists and filmmakers.