TECNO and Angélica Dass Launch Global Portrait Project

The project intends to capture 100 people across Kenya, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Brazil, replacing broad cultural generalizations with specific, lived narratives. For the Kenya chapter, 20 participants—including entrepreneurs like Alex Mutua Muli and community leaders like Jelimo Cheboi—share experiences of redefining success and navigating social expectations. These stories emphasize individual agency, documenting how people build paths that defy predetermined labels or conventional career trajectories.

Technically, the initiative builds on TECNO’s Universal Tone technology, which aims to render diverse skin tones accurately. However, the collaboration with Dass shifts the focus from technical imaging to the human element. By prioritizing trust and listening, the portraits serve as a counter-narrative to AI-driven categorization, which often flattens the complexity of human faces and histories into standardized data points. The series will continue in the Philippines, where the focus shifts to the concept of diskarte, exploring the lives of solo parents beyond common societal archetypes.