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Infinite colors of the human skin | Angélica Dass | TEDxMadrid

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    The first thing which lets me down
    when I am nervous is my Spanish.
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    (Laughter)
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    Well, let's see.
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    Due to my origin, the social and ethnic
    reality in which I was born,
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    I have aways thought about
    the classification of colors
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    associated with race this way:
    red, white, black and yellow.
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    A reduction of something which,
    to me, is really much richer.
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    This is my family,
    adopted members included.
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    I carry in my blood,
    or at least in my eyes,
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    the distinct colors that make
    the Brazilian population.
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    Among them,
    I've never felt different.
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    But, when far from them,
    I sometimes do.
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    That's why I came up with the idea
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    to develop a catalogue of colors,
    but only real colors.
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    To do so, I wanted to find
    a secure mode.
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    Something that would be
    an industrial system,
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    where all the colors
    are of equal importance.
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    Therefore I chose Pantone scales,
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    in which primary colors have
    the same importance as mixed ones.
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    Photos using this color system
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    are made in a very simple
    and easy to reproduce way.
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    On white background.
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    Whan i take portraits
    on a white background,
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    I always pick a 11x11 pixel
    square from the nose.
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    And then I apply this color
    to the background
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    and look for an appropriate color
    in the Pantone system.
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    The choice of the nose is intentional,
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    because it is the first part of body
    that changes color because of sunbathing,
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    or when we are frozen,
    or as a result of drinking too much...
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    So that no one is the same color.
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    Like this man.
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    From the very beginning, the project
    was intended to be realised online,
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    globally, with public announcements.
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    Absolutely everyone is welcomed
    to participate in the project,
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    which has got so much empathy
    from the public,
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    and, finally, all these people
    are our new identities.
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    They are online identities.
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    This project, which was started
    in a customary way
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    and has taken huge proportions
    because I'm always short of colors,
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    was planned as a project
    moving across all five continents.
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    The post remarkable thing
    about this great project
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    is the number of works
    which have risen from it.
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    It's an unfinished project,
    yet it's producing things.
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    One is Kyle Mathewson,
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    professor of the University of Illinois,
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    who uses the portraits from Humanae
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    for his physiology classes.
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    This is John Seymour,
    John Math Guy, who has decided
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    to do a statistic analysis
    of the colors in a scientific way
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    to find out the percentage of each one,
    whether there more of one than the others.
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    This is Emily Hardin' brilliant work,
    who is interested
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    in a formal range of faces
    presented in the project.
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    I publish the photos on Tumblr,
    she draws them on paper.
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    From Los Ángeles, we are entirely
    connected by this unfinished job.
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    Here is the work of Ana Vasconcelos,
    a teacher who lives in São Paulo,
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    who presents the project to her students,
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    she gives them dyes to mix
    then they paint with them.
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    It is to create this personal
    and untransferable identity
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    and completely destroy what is known
    as a "flesh color" pencil .
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    The point is that the pencil
    is not of "body color", not at all.
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    (Applause)
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    One of the most emotional things
    and one of the main rewards,
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    also going back to
    what I said about my family,
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    are the emails I get from
    families with adopted children
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    about this family game
    about identifying those pictures
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    realizing that
    all the colors equalize us.
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    This is the main reward
    of the project.
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    This family is wonderful.
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    I always say that with Humanae,
    I've learned to be a mere catalyst,
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    I am a channel through which
    people partly tell my story,
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    and keep telling their own too,
    because they tell what I'm saying.
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    Humanae is like an invitation to press
    a "share" button inside our brain
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    and equalize us all through tints.
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    There are 1076 of us and I hope
    there will be thousands and thousands.
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    Thank you very much.
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    (Applause)
Title:
Infinite colors of the human skin | Angélica Dass | TEDxMadrid
Description:

For her project Humanae, Angélica Dass, Brazilian artist and photographer, has taken more than a thousand portraits of people from different parts of the world, by which she demonstrates that labels like red, white, brown and yellow are quite inaccurate to define human skin.

More information at: humanae.tumblr.com

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Video Language:
Spanish
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
05:20

English subtitles

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