Hi and welcome to my blog. We recently had our winter exhibition. The topic of the exhibition was Avatar and the grade 8’s, 9’s and 10’s all made projects relating back to the themes of Avatar.
The Grade 8’s – They presented their pandora boxes
The Grade 9’s – We presented our interview videos
The Grade 10’s – They presented their monuments
The driving question of the project was…
“What does James Cameron’s fantasy world of Avatar reveal about society today?”
The movie Avatar was centred around themes like imperialism, racism, militarism, corporate greed and religion. In our society we struggle with lots of these problems, even in our own community. Lots of big businesses make decisions that allow them to make more money without taking social responsibility, like in Avatar the RDA corporation was mining unobtanium (a fictional ore, that was worth millions of dollars) but instead of respecting the environment and Nav’i while mining it they used there military force to destroy the nature on Pandora and take the unobtanium with force. It also showed how the humans treated the Nav’i differently because they lived and look different to the humans. In the movie the Nav’i were called blue monkeys and savages.This nods to real life occurrences like how in the past Canada had residential schools and how some people are treated differently based on there culture.
In my video I wanted to talk about how systemic racism effects peoples daily lives and jobs and how we can help raise awareness about racism. So I contacted the B.C. Black History Awareness Association and I was able to get an interview with Silvia Mangue.
She talked about lots of interesting topics like D’Arcy island.`
D’Arcy Island: D’Arcy island was a leper colony from 1891 to 1924. The lepers were put into isolation, forgotten and left there to die. Every 3 months a supply ship wold come with food and coffins. The people left on D’Arcy island received no medical care even though the early stages of leper are easily treated and not highly contagious. In 1906, the feds passed the “Leprosy Act” and turned the leper colony into a medical facility.
The Exhibition
Our group had one of the biggest rooms to decorate and transform, the topic of our room is the human room. In this room we described how the humans lives were compared to the Nav’i in Avatar. We covered the room in bed sheets and we had a game station (for entertainment for the guests). In this game station we played a game where you had to try to bounce a ball into different holes. If you were successful you got a Carmel, the Nav’i room which was next to ours had the same game but more difficult to represent how life was harder for the Nav’i people compared to the humans lives.
Here’s a picture of me and my friend giving our cupcakes at the exhibition.
Here’s an website you can visit to learn more about the history of D’Arcy island.
Hope you learned something interesting and have a great day.