Read the full transcript of Angélica Dass’ talk titled “The Beauty of Human Skin In Every Color” at TED Talks 2016 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A Family of Colors
ANGÉLICA DASS: It has been 128 years since the last country in the world abolished slavery, and 53 years since Martin Luther King pronounced his “I have a dream” speech. But we still live in a world where the color of our skin not only gives a first impression, but the lasting one that remains. I was born in a family full of colors. My father is the son of an aid from whom he inherited an intense dark chocolate tone. He was adopted by those who I know as my grandparents.
The matriarch, my grandma, has a porcelain skin and cotton-like hair. My grandpa was somewhere between vanilla and strawberry yogurt stone, like my uncle and my cousin. My mother is a cinnamon skin, daughter of a native Brazilian with a pinch of hazel and honey, and a man mix of coffee with milk, but with a lot of coffee. She has 2 sisters, 1 in a toasted peanut skin, and the other also adopted more on the beige side, like a pancake. Growing up in this family, color was never important for me.
Confronting Colorism
Outside home, however, things were different soon. Color had many other meanings. I remember my first drawing lessons in school as a bunch of contradictory feelings. It was exciting and creative, but I never understood the unique flesh color painting. I was made of flesh, but I wasn’t pink.
My skin was brown, and people said I was black. I was 7 years old with a mess of colors in my head. Later, when I took my cousin through school, I was usually taken for the nanny.
By helping in the kitchen at a friend’s party, people thought I was a maid. I was even treated like a prostitute just because I was walking alone on the beach with European friends.
And many times, visiting my grandma or friends in upper-class buildings, I was invited not to use the main elevator because in the end, with this color and this hair, I cannot belong to some places. In some way, I got used to it and accepted part of it. However, something inside of me keeps revolving and struggling. Years later, I married a Spaniard, but not in Spain. I chose one with the skin color of a lobster with some sunburn.
Since then, a new question started to chase me. “What will be the color of your children?” As you can understand, this is my last concern. But thinking about it with my previous background, my story led me to make my personal exercise as a photographer, and that is how “Human Eye” was born.
The Birth of “Human Eye”
Human Eye is a pursuit to highlight our true colors, rather than true white, red, black, or yellow associated with race. It’s the kind of game to question our cause. It’s a work in progress from a personal story to a global history. I portrayed the subject in a white background, then I choose an 11-pixel square from the nose, paint the background, and look for the corresponding color in the industrial palette Pantone.
I started with my family and friends, then more and more people joined the adventure, thanks to public calls coming to social media. I thought that the main space to show my work was Internet because I want to open a concept that invites everybody to push the share button in both the computer and their brain.
Global Impact
The ball started to roll. The project had a great welcome. Invitations, exhibitions, physical formats, galleries, and museums just happened. And among them, my favorite, when it illuminates public spaces and appears in the street, it fosters a popular debate and creates a feeling of community. I have portrayed more than 3,000 people in 13 different countries, 19 different cities around the world, just to mention some of them.
From someone included in the Forbes list to refugees who cross the Mediterranean by boat. In Paris, from the UNESCO headquarters through a shelter, and students both in Switzerland and favelas in Rio de Janeiro. All kinds of beliefs, gender identities, or physical impairments. A newborn or a terminally ill. We all together build.
Those portraits make us rethink how we see each other. When modern science is questioning the race concept, what does it mean for us to be black, white, yellow, red? Is it the eye, the nose, the mouth, the hair, or does it have to do with our origin, nationality, or bank account?
Personal Reflections
This personal exercise turned out to be a discoverer. Suddenly, I realized that Human Eye was useful for many people. It represents a sort of mirror for those who cannot find themselves reflected in any label. It was amazing that people started to share their thoughts about the work with me. I have hundreds that I will share with you too.
A mother of an 11-year-old girl wrote me: “Very good for me as a tool to work on her confidence. As this past weekend, one of her girlfriends argued with her that she does not belong and should not be allowed to live in Norway. So your work has a very special place in my heart, and it’s very important for me.”
I will share her portrait on Facebook and wrote, “All my life, people from across the globe had difficulties to place me in a group, a stereotype, a box. Perhaps we should stop. Instead of framing, ask the individual how would you label yourself. Then I would say, hi. I’m a Dominican Dutch. I grew up in a mixed family, and I’m a bisexual woman.”
Diverse Applications
Besides these unexpected and touching reactions, Human Eye found a new life in a different variety of fields.
Just to show you some examples, illustrators and art students use it as a reference for their sketches and studies. It’s a collection of faces. Researchers in the fields of anthropology, physics, and neuroscience use Human Eye with different scientific approaches related to human ethnicity, optophysiology, face recognition, or Alzheimer’s. One of the most important impacts of the project is that Human Eye was chosen to be the cover of Foreign Affairs, one of the most relevant political publications.
And talking about foreign affairs, I found the perfect ambassadors for my project: teachers. They are the ones that use Human Eye as a tool for educational purposes. Their passion encourages me to go back to drawing classes, but this time as a teacher myself. My students, both adults and kids, think they are self-portrayed trying to discover their own and unique color.
A Personal Journey
As a photographer, I realize that I can be a channel for others to communicate. As an individual, as Angelica, every time I take a picture, I feel that I’m sitting in front of a therapist. All the frustration, fear, and loneliness that I once felt becomes love.
The last country in the world to abolish slavery is the country where I was born, Brazil. We still have to work hard to abolish discrimination that remains a common practice worldwide, and that will not disappear by itself.
