Butterfly mapping project
In my previous post, I created an art lesson based on the work by Favianna Rodriguez.
She is an artist and political activist in the US. Her work is often reused to talk about immigration and especially used in political marches, interactive pieces with people standing in front of the butterfly wings to show they have immigrated or migrate to their current location. Her work focuses on how migration is an entirely normal part of life. It is only the borders that we put up that give use the illusion that migration is not natural. However, she takes the butterfly, especially the Monarch, and shows how it migrates from deep in Mexico to all over the continent. A gentle insect becomes a symbol of showing how people are not so different with our traveling and moving. For my students, I would introduce Rodriguez's work while showing how people who come to a new area are often treated poorly, merely because they are different and the new group is afraid/feels threatened based on limited resources or ignorance. Most, if not all, students have stories of migration in their families and they could all relate to this idea. I would have the kids talk to their family and get some oral history about their origins, do some ancestry.com on their names, and so on. This could be a month long project, but it could actually be a starting point for life long inquiry as to what makes them who they are.
The next part of the project is finding butterflies from the area they most identify with. From there, they would create maps and track their families origin. Below, I tracked my parents and self. I show how my father came from Bulgaria. On a side note, my dad did escape (like many others who migrate) very harsh conditions. This was during the communist era and there was extreme lack of religious freedom besides many other things. My dad was arrested trying to flee from a traveling work company that would have access to other countries. After two years in jail, he was given the choice to go back and I believe, he had a chance to go to England by a sponsorship program through a Christian organization. The sponsorship allowed him to travel freely and he came to America by boat and met his sponsors in Scranton, Pennsylvania, interestingly enough. After a few weeks he decided to go to California mainly because it was warm and he had fond memories of movies he'd seen in Bulgaria. This still makes me smile.
I used the Scolitantides orion butterfly as my dad's butterfly as it's a common butterfly in Bulgaria. I used an orange/yellow Swedish butterfly for my mom and a Monarch for my self as I was born and raised in California. From here, the students could make a map or have a map to track where their particular family/group moved around. It would be fascinating to put this on a really large map so that the students could add all their butterflies and track them with dots to where they are currently. I made little butterfly examples and taped them on with dots color coded to track them.
The second part would be to make large butterfly wings and display them as well. This is where the kids could swap wings and photograph themselves in each one after a group photo was made.
In creating and researching this project, I used google maps, google search engines. family history, verbal family history, ancestry.com, butterfly research as well as traditional art techniques and tools. I would have preferred to have quality art paper for the map but didn't have anything larger enough to give it more scope. The wings could be more or less elaborate depending on the time and how they are being used. Some might even chose to make them wearable (see photo near the bottom of post). Or make them semi-translucent with tissue paper or colored plastic film materials. I could see how this could be a really great way of honoring one's heritage as well as seeing we are all part of this world and migration, is indeed, beautiful.
