Angelica Dass (Rio de Janeiro, 1979) is a Brazilian artist living and working in Madrid.
She has been internationally acclaimed through her pivotal project, Humanæ which is a collection of portrait photos of people revealing the true beauty of human color. The project has been showcased in numerous exhibitions and talks across the continents, and through the TED Global in Vancouver in 2016, her issues and philosophies of the project have reached to the extended numbers of audiences around the world. Dass holds BA in Fine Arts at UFRJ, Brazil and MA in Photography at EFTI, Spain. In 2014 she was selected for Time Magazine as one of the Nine Brazilian Photographers You Need to Follow.
This work intends to deploy a chromatic range of the different human skin colors. Those who pose are volunteers who have known the project and decide to participate. There is no previous selection of participants and there are no classifications relating to nationality, gender, age, race, social class or religion. Nor is there an explicit intention to finish it on a specific date. It is open in all senses and it will include all those who want to be part of this colossal global mosaic. The only limit would be reached by completing all of the world’s population.
However, this taxonomy close to Borges’ world, adopts the format of the PANTONE® guides, which gives the collection a degree of hierarchical horizontality that dilutes the false preeminence of some races over others based on skin color or social condition.
These guidelines have become one of the main systems of color classi cation, which are represen- ted by means of an alphanumeric code, allowing to recreate them accurately in any medium: is a technical-industrial standard. The process followed in Humanæ also is rigorous and systematic: the background for each portrait is tinted with a color tone identical to a sample of 11 x 11 pixels taken from the face of the photographed. Aligned as in the famous samples, its horizontality is not only formal also is ethical.
Many of the ingredients that characterize the [best] spirit of this time appear to be part of this project: shared authorship, active solidarity and local proposals likely to operate globally, networking, communication expanded to alternative spaces of debate, awareness without political ideology, so- cial horizontality… The spectator is invited to press the share button in his brain.
