Hola,
Welcome back to yet, again another blog post.
Today I will talk about one of my new favourite projects “Case for a Nation”. We were to choose a country or event that connected to “Nationalism”. My friend Sepaus and I decided to learn about the Mexican war of Independence which in my opinion was one of the most important events in Mexican history. What we were actually working towards was to make an Instagram post about out topics with 3 different pictures.
Everything seemed pretty straight froward except for the fact that we weren’t too sure what “Nationalism”meant.
The driving question for this project was “How can an understanding of nationalism in the past, help us make sense of today?”
I think that understanding where some traits of a country come from can easily make sense of why the countries communicate, work, live, and coexist differently than other countries. For example today, modern Mexico speaks Spanish, 72% of the population is catholic, and all of the indigenous temples and pyramids are considered ruins. The reasoning behind these topics is that when Spain colonized Mexico, they abolished almost all indigenous culture, language, buildings in order to take over the “new land”.
We started learning what Nationalism means and what it means to people by making a “Canadian Check” video. (TikTok trend including Drake’s “God’s Plan” and a stereotypical Canadian trait). Unfortunately I don’t have the video to show you but if you do want to see what it is, go to TikTok and search up “Canadian Check”.
We then got into groups of 3-4 and were assigned to a province, territory, or general area of Canada to reenact Canada’s confederation. My group was assigned Nova Scotia so we started working by reading through letters and statements written by people who lived in our locations, learned some characteristics and important traits of Nova Scotia, and who they ally with.
We then made a set of demands that needed to be fulfilled if we were to join confederation and also stated where we though Canada’s capital should be.
Some of the demands we decided were necessary were the Canadian Railway, Better Trade, Strong Gov’t, Strong Nation, and Military Protection and decided we wanted our capital to be Cains Mountain because it was hard for enemies to access.
Now that we knew what Nationalism meant we started the kinda fun part. We all chose a topic like Indian nationalism or the Canadian Indian act. I chose to learn about the Mexican war of Independence and worked with my friend Sepaus to create 3 images which would be posted to Instagram.
We needed to create 3 different images that represented some aspects of our nationalism topic.
First was the “drawn on image” which was a black and white picture with self drawn images on it.                                 I gathered a couple of paintings from the Mexican war of Independence and edited some flowers so that they fit in with my picture as well as 3 documents establishing Mexico’s independence.
Second was the “quote” image; a quote from an important or key person during your nationalism and a picture to go with it.                                                                      I used picture I used in the previous image but added a cream coloured circle with a black brush-stroke outline to make it look nice with the painting.    Â
Third was a “choice”. For this image you could make a collage, drawing, meme, pretty much anything. I chose to keep mine simple and make a collage of multiple paintings from the Mexican war of Independence.
Finally my partner and I decided to post both my “drawn on” and “quote” images and his “choice” picture which was a mix of a quote/collage.
Unfortunately my images haven’t been posted yet so you won’t find it on the instagram webpage.
Thanks for visiting again, hope you found my work interesting