Video: Hurrah, it's Butlins!

"Hurrah, it's Butlins!" is a 30-minute film screened behind Lonely Tourist's performance in Reds (Butlins, Bognor Regis), as part of Rockaway Beach festival in January 2022 and again in 2024. The images above are stills and a very short snippet of the full piece.

The film is specific to its location, and is about going on holiday to someone else’s past (originally screened at a time when we couldn’t travel easily due to the coronavirus pandemic). The 30-minute film was a montage of drawings, films, and borrowed archival footage related to Butlins, so that concert-goers would recognise the location, performer, and Butlins references pictured, and experience a time-hopping trip from the bleakness of the present to the Kodachrome-inflected history of the place they were in, and back again. 

Within this project I worked through illustration to examine how materials and imagery operate in creating a “reflective-nostalgic” message for the viewer. The outcome incorporates reflective nostalgia as a visual strategy in order to maintain the critical distance that is often presumed missing from nostalgic imagery. It does so through the use of layers and visual language to differentiate times and perspectives. It utilises two different visual languages for “pastness”, in order to emphasise the difference between images from the past and contemporary reinterpretations of images of the past. For Svetlana Boym, this gap between past and present is central to nostalgia’s “wistfulness”, the longing that characterises nostalgia, here employed with the goal of keeping the past at a distance. Because the past is also a cesspit.

"Hurrah, it's Butlins" has been included in the IAIA virtual exhibition 'Illustrated and Written by...', which contains 25+ peer-reviewed international illustration research projects. The exhibition was curated by Ari Chand and colleagues, and is a joint project between University of South Australia and University of Newcastle, Australia.