Bataille’s ideas about excess, waste and expenditure are displayed in Cheltenham, ‘where social or commercial status may not be displayed via a display of wealth, but by a display of destruction or wastefulness’. In our group, we put together a short video that captures some of the ideas that we’ve been exploring and some music that reflects some of these themes.

Cheltenham presents itself to the passers-through that it is a town of precision built white buildings with perfect black pillared balconies, however, this is a very small part of Cheltenham, sat upon the main roads around the town’s one-way system.

If you look at the shiny white buildings, you can see the derelict walls by just walking around the corner – every building has a back entrance or runs on to a back street.

These back streets are small and the pavements and roads have no tax-payers money spent on them, they are all over the place – even at the top of the high street, slowly getting better until the pavement runs flush as it passes by the high-end shops in the high street.

The video shows the vast contrast between what Cheltenham poses as, and what it actually is, shown by contrasting shots between the newly built-up areas next to extremely run-down buildings

 

FILMED BY: Natalie McNulty

RESEARCH BY: Jade Kelly, Eva Suzczenia-Whitt

EDITED BY: Vinisha Nadarjah

 

 

***** Error in video *Luxuary* spelling mistake spotted post-production. (*Luxury)