Allergy of Apology

Hello internet, welcome to blog theory, if you get that reference your awesome. Anyways I’m back with another blog for you which means another project has come to a close, this blog will actually be on the project we did known as ology of apology aswell as the winter exhibition that came with it. This exhibition was like no other though and if you want to know why then you’ll have to read the whole post, or I guess you could look at the title.

So to start off this project we of course need ourselves a driving question and this time it was, drum roll please! 🥁🥁🥁🥁 “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?” This is important because obviously apologizing can mean and do many things but those thing would be learned during this project.

First of all we launched the project by starting to learn about memorials because when it comes down to it memorials are often just big apologies and that’s what this project is about. We started looking into what a memorial is and what differentiates them from other works of art like sculptures or paintings, well the short answer is almost anything can have a memorial as long as it meets this criteria. Number 1 is it has to be about memory, a memorial displays a memory to keep it alive and bring awareness of it to many generations, Number 2 is it needs to be something physical that focuses upon and draws attention to one specific memory about something important and number 3 is the memory must be a public memory so it’s something that many can relate too. That’s what a memorial needs to be but there also a few things it can be, memorials are reminders of things bad but also often something good and not all memorials are built by big corporations but they can be constructed by a community.

Now I’ve told you about what a memorial is you might be wondering why I told you, if you guessed that we would be making a memorial somehow then you would be correct, and to prepare for making our final memorial we were tasked with designing our own mini models of memorials with Lego. I immediately thought of a major event that was very recent, you may have heard of it it’s called COVID-19, it was this whole big pandemic thing wasn’t the most fun to be honest, I thought to myself what’s something everyone relates too as a symbol of this pandemic and I came to the conclusion that I would display this major event with a memorial of a mask here’s what I designed. 

And here’s my descriptive paragraph about it.

My memorial was a giant face mask to symbolize the struggles and hardships that affected everyone in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. When we were told we would be making a memorial that would mean something to the public I immediately thought of the COVID pandemic as it was such a recent event that shook up the whole world and affected everyone in some way. If I was building a real memorial I would have inscribed the names of loved ones lost to the virus onto the front of the mask, I also added a spinning mechanism because it looks cool and would draw attention to the monument. I faced some challenges while building it mainly due to the limitations of the provided Lego bricks. I needed pieces that could hold other pieces in place since my design was held in the air by a stand. While building it I struggled to keep it all in one piece and it kept falling apart when I was trying out new designs and colours. I chose to make a COVID mask as it is something so widely recognizable by all as a symbol for the pandemic, whether you have seen videos of crazy anti-maskers or you yourself had to wear one for your safety. It’s a simple design that everyone is impacted by because we all lost someone in some way and even if you personally didn’t lose someone the names of those who were lost puts the numbers of the death toll into proportion. So in conclusion a COVID mask is an easily recognizable symbol of the global pandemic we all went through and although I had some struggles building it I still managed to come up with a design I was happy with and that everyone understood.

In addition to this we also looked into some other memorials the world had to offer just to further our understanding and if your interesting I recommend looking into the tomb of the unknown warrior in England the story behind it is quite interesting.

So now you might be wondering what we were going to make our memorials on, well we were going to be apologizing to one of 3 groups and I was selected for the Chinese Canadians. Before learning about that though we first started to look into discrimination and one of the major contributors to radical and discrimination in general is negative propaganda. Looking into different types of propaganda we talked a lot about anti-semitism as for some reason it’s becoming more mainstream again in recent years, things like social media have made expressing negative opinions to the masses easier than ever, and to talk about that I had to write a paragraph on exactly that topic, here’s what I came up with.

Propaganda can influence people in a good and bad way, but how can this affect people’s thoughts about standing up for those that need help? When people see propaganda it can affect them on all kinds of levels, some people just glance at it but don’t bother to look into it and move on with their day. Others may be deeply affected and have their opinions changed and morphed by it, an example is when the Nazi’s took over certain territories they placed propaganda in schools to try and influence the youth, some children were deeply impacted by this and it twisted their thoughts into believing that they were ugly and disgusting, while other children thought the same thing about them. Propaganda still affects us nowadays with social media being a major part of almost everyone’s daily lives around the world and with hate and hate crimes on the rise in recent years it’s reasonable to suspect that social media platforms have something to do with it. People can get away with saying almost anything today and with algorithms making it easier to see more of something once it’s been seen once peoples brain can be easily influenced into changing for the better and worse. Anti-semitism has shot up in recent years and there are so many links and ties that can be traced back to social media roots, a major example is Kanye West. Kanye West is a largely influential music artist with bipolar disorder, in recent years he has made many claims of being anti-Semitic which has influenced many people. Another major example is Andrew Tate, he is an influencer that has spread ideas and thoughts of misogyny to young minds of this generation. He is a multi-millionaire which gives him power and status and with this he has been distributing thoughts of sexism and has popularized being a so called “alpha male” which many take seriously and others mock this idea. Even though recently propaganda has spiked there has been many examples throughout history and all have a somewhat similar affect and outcome on those impacted by it. All of this ties into how propaganda changes peoples personal actions, for example those that see a lot of anti-semitism online are either more likely to stand by and do nothing if they ever see something like this happening in real life or they are more like to step in and stop things after seeing what people say online. Of course it’s possible that the opposite effect happens and they would be more motivated to join the oppressor in the confrontation. In shprt, many diffferent parts of a person can be changed by propaganda whether they are more likely to help those in need, more likely to attack those in need or if they are just to stand by and do nothing. No matter the time period people can be very impressionable so we have to be cautious of what we say.

I’m really proud of this work and I think I was able to convey my thoughts and beliefs on the topic through it. 

Now we spent a whole lot of time just learning about BC’s history in order to find out what each group wanted to base their memorial on and I don’t want this blog to be a lot  longer than it has to be so I’ll just tell you what my group focused on and presented about. We picked the Chinese head tax and immigration for Chinese people to Canada from 1858 to 1923. In short the gold rush brought many Chinese immigrants to BC an as a result of that the white people there and the government wanted them gone, so their idea was to make specifically Chinese immigrants have to pay a tax of $50 which was then raised to $100 and finally became $500 which was equivalent to over 2 years of labour and finally in 1923 they outright banned all Chinese immigration into Canada. After learning about this we knew it was right to make a memorial on it. We went through many design ideas but I believe we made one that represented our topic well. Our idea was to have an open suitcase with different things attached to a paper cutout of a man, there were lanterns depicting good things about immigrating to Canada and ankle weights displaying negative things about moving to Canada. The suitcase represented how all of the culture was never able to leave the immigrants luggage. We also made a information board and 3 other thing just to talk about the topic and describe our memorial, finally our group chose the name Symbold in Suspension for our memorial. When the day of the day of the exhibition came we were all somewhat mortified as we had started working on the final project last week but we were more prepared than we thought, but something we never prepared for was coming. After setting up our station this is what it looked like. 

I think everything turned out very well and for the short time I did I enjoyed talking to people about what I had learned, and I say short time because… well each of our exhibits had to have food and something to interact with, I had a stroke of genius that lead me to think an amazing idea would be to get people to use chopstick to move things over a line and some of that was our food, specifically fortune cookies. So you see I’ve never eaten a fortune cookie before and I’ve always wondered what they’re like so when my group brought them as one of our snack I kind of wanted to try one however I’m cursed with having soooo many allergies and there were no ingredients on the box so I opted not to have one but what I forgot to remember was not to touch them but one of our items to pick up with the chopsticks was, you guessed it, a fortune cookie. While resetting the game I had multiple time picked up the fortune cookie, which was fine at first but after getting an itch on my face everything went down hill. All of a sudden my eyes were getting watery and itchy, I stupidly thought nothing of it but then they wouldn’t stop itching which meant I touched my face more which made everything worse, on top of that my nose started running and I started sneezing uncontrollably, for those who don’t know me I’m not the most socially confident so sneezing mid conversation with a stranger makes me want to cry. Luckily my lord and saviour my mum showed up early into the exhibition and I expressed to her how I was feeling and she knew that Chinese food often has nuts in it, what an odd coincidence, IM ALLERGIC TO NUTS! I was having an allergic reaction to my own groups food mid exhibition she walked me out of the room and we found one of my teachers who thankfully brought me to the office and my lovely vice principal gave me some medication and a place to wash my face off, safe to say I went home early. My group still did amazing though and that was shown in the voting tally at the end, I’m very thankful for them and how they handled the unexpected situation. The turnout of the exhibition seemed great, here are some photos my friends took. 

Overall the exhibition was a bit of a nightmare for me but in the end everything was fine, but now for what you’ve all (maybe) been waiting for, who’s group did the best, we had all guest vote in a ballet and even though I think there was some rigging here are the results.

As you can see we tied for first with another group, so now we have our answer to that we need to answer a different question, a driving question once again our question was “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?” In my opinion apologies can be kept alive in many ways such as memorials, schools or even by being passed down through family trees, all of these ways work for different reasons but are still able to keep things alive and serve as reminders and warnings about the past.

Thank you for reading my blog this exhibition was certainly my most… interesting one yet, I hope you enjoyed reading this far and now you know that apologies can be for many things like apologizing for a wrong theory, A GAME THEORY. Thanks for reading and putting up with my jokes and references.