Translator: Natalia Ost Reviewer: Denise RQ
I have a challenge for us today,
a challenge for a world where 250 million people
are searching for a new home through mass migration.
A challenge for a time when 1,8 billion images
are posted to social media on a daily basis.
A challenge for a society where we need to educate our young
for a very uncertain future.
I have a challenge about identity.
What drives our identities?
Are they given or are they created?
So, today, together, I would like to explore the idea of identity
as a creative process.
Who are we? And what can we become?
So, who am I?
I'm a photographic artist. I was born here, in Exeter.
I self-identify as a 100% British.
And I was named after a famous Roman philosopher emperor.
But wait a minute.
Today is the first day I've been in Exeter since I was born here 50 years ago.
My ancestral DNA tells me
actually I'm much more French and Scandinavian than British.
And the truth of the matter is I was named after my great uncle Richard's
fabulously foul-mouthed African Grey parrot Marcus Aurelius,
who he saved from the Southern Sudan in the late 1930s.
Now, if you really want to know what drives me,
where my energy is from,
you only need to know one thing.
And that's the loss of my brother Andrew when I was six.
That loss and the subsequent journey of self-realization that continues today
has given me an amazing energy for life,
a passion for the here and now,
and a sense of responsibility for living a life that Andrew didn't get.
But isn't that a choice, an act?
Have I not just made that up? It's a piece of creation.
That creation's been supported throughout my life
by photography and the camera.
I was given my first camera when I was 10 years old,
and I've rarely been without one since.
Now, the camera has many uses,
but it's its ability to hold time, to stop for a fragile second
the journey towards death that seems most powerful here.
In many ways, it's been transformational in my life,
helping me take a life out of balance and find a voice, my voice.
It's also been the red carpet
to everywhere and anyone I wanted to know or meet.
For 40 years, I've made images from the ghetto to the palace,
from the fashion shoot to the social issue reportage,
giving voice to the known and the unknown.
In many ways, it's been a key
to the most transformational relationships in my life.
It's given me access to some of the most intimate inner places,
other realities, and other lives.
Dare I tell you, I actually photographed my wife before we ever spoke
or even knew each other's names.
So the camera has helped me explore ideas of identity,
my own and others'.
And today, I would like to give you an insight into my most recent project
"Somos Brasil", "We are Brazil".
It's an exploration of modern Brazilian identity
through the lens of a series of DNA and sound-enabled portraits.
So, for 30 years I've traveled across the Americas,
and I've remained amazed at how differently
those from the North and the South self-identify.
Many from the US seem resolutely attached to the idea of motherland.
Brazilians seem undaunted by simply being Brazilian.
So when I met, fell in love with,
married a Brazilian,
and we made two very beautiful Brazenglish children,
and they turn to me and say,
"Daddy, nós somos brasileiros,"
"We are Brazilians,"
I knew I had a deeper search on my hands
to understand the identity of my family.
So my team and I traveled 22,000 kilometers across Brazil
taking the photographs, the soundscapes, and the DNA samples
of a cohort of remarkable Brazilians,
all who'd been nominated as agents of change within their communities,
in many ways, the best of Brazil.
Now we've taken the sound, and we've turned it into a sound app,
it's an image-activated app, you swipe your device over their faces,
and they tell you their stories.
They talk about their communities,
their childhood memories, their dreams and aspirations for the future.
In many ways, this is actually a disruptive act,
the reality is, as an audience,
we mostly make our own judgments about images, we make our own choices.
But here, we've managed to give a voice to the voiceless.
The DNA in many ways is also a different lens
in which we can look at identity.
Most interestingly for me, it's less the science
and the fact of the matter that matters here.
It's actually how we weave this new fabulous science
and the information it gives us into our own personal histories.
My wife, blond, blue eyes, Brazilian.
And yet when she took her DNA test, she found out that she carried
both African, Sephardic Jewish, and Latin American tribal blood.
She was able to see her life, her community,
and her role within her family in a completely different way.
So, this project that brings art and science together, I think,
puts a mirror up to a society that has a very all-encompassing culture,
but it also allows us to define a space where we can explore identity.
So, today I would like to share with you four of the stories
that I had the great honor to bear witness to.
So, Anna-Claudia, she told us of her childhood memories.
Some idyllic; playing in the fields of Sao Paolo
with her sisters and her cousins,
but some horrific - witnessing the pain and the suffering
of her grandmother Maria-Paula,
who had a terrible arterial condition
which meant she had to have a double leg amputation.
Young Anna's life was permeated with that pain,
and in response, she cut all the legs of her dolls
and turned her bedroom into an infirmary.
She vowed that no one would suffer like her grandmother would,
she trained to be a doctor,
she qualified the day her grandmother died.
She's now renowned across Brazil
for being an exceptional palliative care doctor,
preaching a gospel of love for people at the end of their lives.
Bekwynhka -- we met in the Botanical Gardens of Belém;
the son of a tribal leader,
he reminisced to us about the Kayapó tribe, a warrior tribe,
and his grandfather who died protecting his lands and traditions
from the invading colonists.
When Cabral traveled to Brazil from Portugal in 1500,
he found a wondrous land of three to five million tribal peoples
across its vast forest and seaboard.
Today, from colonization, slavery, environmental destruction, and disease,
we're looking at a number of more like 300,000.
So Bekwynhka has reinvented his role in his society as a warrior counselor.
He talks to his people about modern Brazil and gives them an opportunity
to protect their culture, their traditions, and their land.
Leila took our breath away.
Elegant and energetic, she was born
the daughter of a migrant worker from the North East.
Alongside her doorman father
living a block from Ipanema Beach, in Rio de Janeiro,
she witnessed the poverty and wealth of Brazil at first hand.
Determined to make a difference, she set up a company "Beleza Natural",
a cosmetics firm that today employs 2,300 people,
90% of whom are single mothers from the favelas.
She is testament to vision and hard work
and talks to her young staff and tells them,
"Not even the sky is the limit."
Now, I was delighted to meet Eliane.
She was telling us
and marveling at the fact that her father at 85 still made an annual pilgrimage
to the grave of his first teacher, Luisa,
the daughter of a slave and a merchant.
Luisa had taught him and cured him of his blindness to words,
thus allowing him to nurture his illiterate family,
to give Eliane the chance to be a significant wordsmith;
and today an award-winning journalist.
I was amazed by how Eliane self-identified.
She saw her whole life as boundless.
She saw herself as the sum of all the stories she'd ever heard.
And in the vastness of the Universe she saw all life as a singularity,
but her own as a multitude.
So, as an artist, in my studio, we often talk about reinvention,
the need, dare I say, the necessity,
to see multiple possibilities of our futures,
to embrace change, to see the opportunity in the unknown.
So, I hope, through the lens of these Brazilian lives
you can see that identity can be a journey.
We can write fictions of our lives.
So, the next time you sit and ponder on the "Who am I?" question,
consider that we truly grow our identities
when we are guiding lights to not only to ourselves but to others.
Thank you.
(Applause)