Joana Biarnés
Grant

Motherhood after 40 cannot be understood as a purely individual decision. It arises at the intersection of economic, labor, cultural, and biological factors that define the real framework within which this desire—or this possibility—is constructed.

This research analyzes this context from different perspectives: the reproductive crisis in Spain, the rise of fertility tourism, the transformation and precarization of care work, and a critical reflection on the very concept of desire in a scenario shaped by structural constraints.

In recent decades, women’s access to higher education and the labor market has profoundly transformed life trajectories. However, the promise that it would be possible to first consolidate professional, economic, and personal stability before becoming a mother is, in many cases, an illusion. When stability is delayed and the body ages, many women find themselves facing a difficult-to-resolve tension.

The origin of this project is personal and documented. My aunt Laly, who died in 2009 at the age of 46 from uterine cancer, tried to become a mother through various assisted reproductive treatments. During that process, she kept a detailed record of consultations, diagnoses, and procedures in a diary that I still have. This personal archive marked the starting point for this research, which combines personal testimony and social analysis.

The work brings together the stories of women in Spain who have experienced motherhood—or tried—after the age of 40. They are women with diverse backgrounds: working women, migrants, professionals, with and without support networks. Their experiences allow us to observe how factors such as job insecurity, difficulty accessing housing, relationship instability, and the unequal distribution of caregiving influence their lives. In short, a multifactorial crisis.

Official data show a sustained shift in the age of motherhood and an increase in assisted reproductive treatments, in a context where biological probabilities decrease with age. This reality has led to an increasing and exhausting medicalization of the reproductive process and has highlighted the structural limitations that condition what is presented as an individual decision.

The project proposes a critical reading of this scenario. Through photography and testimonies, it documents how these decisions are constructed in a context marked by precariousness and a social organization of care that remains unequal. The aim is to provide context, data, and narratives that allow us to understand why more and more women are becoming mothers later in life and under what conditions they do so.

Eroding Franco is a visual journalism project that links the environmental debt of the Franco regime (1939–1975) to the current desertification crisis in Spain.

Desertification—the transformation of fertile land into arid landscapes—is a critical global challenge, worsened by unsustainable practices such as poor water management and intensive agribusiness. In Spain, this problem is especially evident: the legacy of Francoism cemented mass tourism, construction, and industrial agriculture as the country’s “economic pillars,” promoted during the so-called “economic miracle” (1959–1973). This model reshaped the territory and laid the foundations for a desertification machine.

According to scientific studies, 80% of Spanish territory could face the critical effects of desertification before the end of the 21st century. This phenomenon is not only an environmental crisis: it destroys rural economies, displaces communities, and erodes the collective memory that connects society to its land.

Eroding Franco emerges from the synergy between historical archives and contemporary photography in order to explore how past decisions shape the present. With a critical and scientific perspective, the project invites reflection on the need to learn from the past in order to face the environmental challenges of the future.

“Demotanasia” is the process by which, due to political actions—or the lack thereof—the population of a territory is driven to disappear. Death by depopulation is slow and silent. Ruthless toward the land, nature, and cultural heritage. The situation is no less dramatic for the people who inhabit—or rather, resist—in rural areas. Those who live in absolute solitude in what is silently, and mistakenly, called empty Spain. In reality, it is not yet empty.

Europe is the most aged continent in the world. One of the regions most affected by aging, according to Eurostat, is Galicia. There is a high percentage of elderly people with limited autonomy or varying degrees of dependency who refuse to leave the land where they have lived their entire lives.

Much of the aging population is left behind in these areas, with insufficient care and very limited social and healthcare coverage. These are traditionally smallholding territories, shaped by a rugged geography that makes intensive production impossible. The current voracious market of mass production and overproduction, coupled with poor telecommunications and transport connections, has led to an inverted demographic pyramid in most of these territories. There are population centers where the pyramid has no base at all, due to extremely low birth rates and mass rural exodus.

Rural depopulation is one of the causes of many environmental problems, such as the increasing intensity of wildfires or the rise in soil erosion. If there are no radical changes, the death of the last rural inhabitants will mark the end of a social model—and then, Spain will truly become empty.

Spain is the third-largest exporter of fruits and vegetables in the world, behind only the United States and China. This position places the country at the forefront of global industrial food production. Being a world or European leader in the production of foods such as mangoes, avocados, strawberries, olive oil, or pork means that both the land and its natural resources—as well as the people who live there—are geared toward and bound to maximum output and economic profitability, far removed from any balance with the environment or the most basic human rights.

Hasta que la tierra aguante (Exhausted Land) is a journalistic and visual investigation—a journey through inland Spain and the country’s major food production centers to examine the environmental, social, and health consequences of a food production model rooted in greed and denial of the planet’s biological limits.

Agriculture and livestock farming play a major role in the advance of climate change, consuming vast amounts of water, depleting soil and nutrients, generating waste and pollution that flows into rivers and aquifers, and relying on labor conditions that border on semi-slavery.

But this project is also a call to reflection—for cities and the contemporary urban model of consumption. The endless exploitation of rural resources and people by large multinationals is, in part, the result of a consumption model that neither sees nor feels the wounds it causes, and which follows no natural or human rhythm.

We produce as we consume—and vice versa.

Cartas a Mariví (Letters to Mariví) an exhibition produced and curated by Photographic Social Vision, is the result of Samuel Nacar’sinvestigation into a generation destined for precarity—young people without opportunities in their homeland who migrate to the large cities of the peninsula. They abandon peripheral Spain, a territory about which little is ever told, and whose industrial dismantling leads to progressive abandonment, generating an emptied Spain.

Nacar has traveled nearly 12,000 kilometers through the Spanish periphery, identifying a recurring pattern: he finds collapse in Linares (Jaén), labeled “the city with the highest unemployment in Europe” since the closure of the Santana automotive factory over a decade ago; he locates deindustrialization in Andorra (Teruel), a town that once rivaled Stockholm in quality of life, until the announcement of the closure of the Endesa thermal power plant; and he encounters resistance in A Mariña (Lugo), where 30% of the province’s GDP depends on the American company Alcoa, one of the world’s largest aluminum producers, and where workers have agreed to temporarily stop production to prevent the possible closure of the factory.

It is an unstoppable process that stretches from Cádiz to León, through provinces that were once wealthy and now watch their youth depart. Samuel Nacar gives voice to these young people, who see no future in their places of origin, convinced that they will never be able to work in the fields for which they were trained, to afford a home, or even to consider having children.