129 years ago that the last country on the planet and in Latin America
ended with slave slavery, Brazil, the country where I was born.
And 54 years since Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech.
But we continue to live in a world where the color of the skin
not only generates a first impression, but has many meanings
and it is loaded with stereotypes.
I was born into a multicolored family.
I always describe it in the same way.
My father is the son of a domestic employee
from whom he inherited an intense chocolate tone.
He was adopted by those I know as my grandparents.
The matriarch, my grandmother, had porcelain skin and cotton hair.
My grandfather was something between a vanilla and strawberry yogurt,
Like my uncles and my cousin.
My mother, cinnamon, is the daughter of a descendant of Brazilian Indians.
Hazelnut and honey
And a man, mixed with coffee and milk, but with a lot of coffee.
She has two sisters, one, roasted peanuts,
and the other, adopted, beige like a pancake.
So growing up in this family, color was never important to me.
But away from home, things changed very early,
because color had many meanings.
I remember the first drawing classes at school
as a mixture of contradictory feelings:
It was fun, creative, but I never understood the “skin-colored pencil”.
I had skin, but it was not pink.
My skin was brown and people said I was black.
He was 7 years old and had a mess of colors on his head.
A year later, when I was taking my cousin to school,
They always confused me with the nanny.
By helping in the kitchen, at a friend’s party,
They thought I was the domestic employee.
I was even treated as a prostitute, just for being
Walking on the beach with European friends.
And many times, when visiting my grandmother or friends in high class buildings,
they invited me not to use the main elevator,
because, in the end, with this color and this hair, I do not belong to some places.
Somehow I got used to that but something inside of me was
as a rebel and fighting.
Years later, I married a Spaniard. But it was not any Spanish.
I chose one of the kind that turns red like a tomato when it gets a little sun.
From that moment, another question began to haunt me.
What will be the color of your child?
As you can understand, this is my last concern.
But thinking about that, and with my own personal history, it led me to create
a photographic project and that’s how Humanae was born.
Humanae is an attempt to question the colors associated with the race:
red, white, black and yellow.
It’s a kind of game to question those codes.
It’s a work in progress from a personal story
to our global history.
I portrait my volunteers on a white background.
Then, I choose a square of 11 by 11 pixels of the nose,
I paint the background and look for the corresponding one in the Pantone industrial palette
because I’m sure what is the color white and black in this palette
and I can assure you that none of my photos are.
I started with my family and friends, after more and more people participated
thanks to public calls made through social networks.
From the beginning I believed that the main place to exhibit this work
it was Internet because I wanted an open concept that invited everyone
to press the Share button, not only on the computer but also in your mind.
The snowball began to spin.
The project was very popular, invitations to exhibitions, galleries,
museums, they just happened.
And my favorite: when Humanae occupies public spaces and appears on the street
because it provokes a popular debate and creates the feeling of community.
I retracted almost 4000 people in 17 countries and 26 cities around the planet.
Just to mention some, to people who belong to the Forbes list,
to refugees who have arrived in Patera to Spain.
In Paris, from the headquarters of Unesco to host places.
And to students, both in Switzerland and in favelas in Rio de Janeiro.
All kinds of beliefs, gender identities, disabilities.
From a newborn to a terminally ill.
All together we build Humanae.
These portraits make us rethink how we see others.
When modern science questions the concept of race,
What does it mean for us to be white, black, red, yellow?
Are the eyes, the hair, the color?
Is it associated with our culture, identity or bank account?
With work on the Internet, many people began to share with me what I thought.
I have a lot of stories like these, I’m going to share two.
“I grew up in a family that had Ku Klux Klan beliefs,
who indoctrinated me and forced me to abuse other children
based on skin color or ethnicity.
I checked it and left it behind.
Then I realized that I was repeating a pattern and in doing so,
I did not share what I really wanted to say.
This is what I want to say: Humanae is touching a deep fiber in me
and releasing my soul to be closer to what I was meant to be. “
A woman shared her portrait on Facebook and wrote to me:
“All my life everyone has had difficulties to place me in a group,
in a stereotype, in a box.
Maybe we should stop. Instead of pigeonholing, let’s ask:
How would you describe yourself?
So I would say: Hi, I’m Maciel, I’m North American-Dutch,
I grew up in a mixed family and I am a bisexual woman. “
Apart from all these exciting stories,
Humanae found its impact in different areas.
I could talk about many of them: scientists, anthropologists, physicists,
Sociologists use the work in their investigations.
There are artists, illustrators, who use this collection of faces available online.
We have approached our rulers.
In Habitat III, which is the conference of the United Nations
to think about the future of cities; and diversity has to be
an important guideline for the future of cities.
Or for example, in the last edition of the Davos Economic Forum,
where Humanae was at the entrance for our rulers to see
that has to be a theme of our day to day.
But the truth today I’m going to focus on what I think is the facet
most important of Humanae: education.
Throughout the planet pedagogues, educators, teachers,
use Humanae as an educational tool
and teach the values of equality from a young age,
identity and self-esteem to these children.
Obviously, his passion made me go back to drawing class.
These are some examples of my work with children.
And I came back to this class.
And returning had many meanings for me.
It was a cycle closure.
I remember perfectly when I was 6 years old and one of my classmates told me
He did not want to play with me because I had the color of shit.
My teacher did nothing at the time but very recently
I received a wonderful mail
of a teacher from the Spanish Basque Country
– You have surely done that exercise in which we painted
hands and leave the prints –
The truth we always do, since Prehistory.
It is like our first moment, human signal, leaving our traces.
Well, she decided to do it differently: she did this exercise
with their 3-year-old students, but instead of using normal colors,
He created the color of each of the children.
He sends me the photo and an email that said:
“All life doing things in the same way;
this year my group could perceive the richness of its diversity “.
Discrimination is a practice of our daily life
and it will not go away on its own.
Only us, doing things differently
We are going to abolish it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
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