Lesson 11 (Orwell)
About the "Lessons" Series
Since 2014, I have been working on a series of video projection pieces called “Lessons” that record my efforts to teach my children empathy and morality through culturally significant texts. We have created works responding to texts by Adrienne Rich, the New Testament, Gene Sharp, John Steinbeck, and James Baldwin.
About “Lesson 11 (Orwell)”
“Lesson 11 (Orwell)” focuses on Orwell’s seminal novel, 1984. The novel is always high on lists of the most "banned" books in the United States. We are struck by the book's continued relevance to our times, with social media and digital tracking constantly in the news. We are also interested in 1984's statements on the teaching and control of history, a problem many US states (including our own, Tennessee) are making concerning decisions about now. "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." We have had excellent discussions about how history impacts our lives and how some have benefited from how we tell the story of history, while others have suffered.