VICTOR UNWIN

Symbolic suburbia, Blue Moon Magazine Issue 10
In conversation with Simon Gérard

Living in Paris, and raised in the northern edge of the city’s outskirts, Victor Unwin’s work is the result of complex protocols serving ideas based on both personal and philosophical foundations. In his work, the aesthetics arise less from appearance than from the structure of appearance itself. From video installations to sculpture, photography, and publishing, Unwin produces system-works fed by non-conventional narrative forms, with the intent of creating other paths of thought. A discussion on distressed symbolism, the power of image granted by our reality system, and the development of new sacralities in the suburban hyperobject.

SG For those reading us now, I think it’s important to understand that you and I work in the same space in Paris, and that we’ve been friends since we were fifteen, living in L’Isle-Adam. We also found out not long ago that we went to the same kindergarten without even realising it [both laugh]. I know you’ve always been crafting things, and that creativity has often been the driving force behind your life choices. Today, and since 2021, you have your own artistic practice. I’d like you to tell me how that shift happened, because your path isn’t exactly a conventional one.

VU If we start from childhood, yeah, I was making videos with Félix — one of our common best friends growing up — when we were maybe nine or ten. We were inspired by the older kids in L’Isle-Adam, who were making skate videos or clips, and we were trying to do the same. It got more serious as teenagers: I started taking photos of my friends skating and riding BMX, and hanging out with the older guys at the skatepark who had a hardcore punk band that toured. I went on the road with them, shooting photos and videos at the festivals where they were invited. At that point it was clear to me that I wanted to make images. When I was seventeen, I started working with production companies in Paris, moving from post-production and editing to directing and art direction — but I eventually exhausted myself out after a decade. Thinking you can really express yourself through a micro-campaign for Saint Laurent or any other brand is a mistake.

SG That’s when you went back to hanging out with people from the communities you come from — punk, skate, surf, and so on.

VU And I started making loads of images again — more personal, more meaningful to me. Between your work as a producer and curator, and my interest in image and film, we’ve been talking for years about installations to conceive, about videos I write, about philosophy and art theory, dramaturgy, and my wish to make fiction someday… But if there had to be a formal starting point — something that really launched the dynamic I’m still in — it would be 2021, and it actually came from your invitation: the first zine of your publishing house KERMESSE — the MONO series. That quickly gave me an easy space where I could make images exist.

SG That’s not a coincidence. Unlike some artists who enjoy making books alongside their practice, your editorial work feels fully part of your artistic practice — it’s not something peripheral.

VU I don’t see any difference, no. Making a film, an installation, a book — for me, it all comes from the same gesture. What I love about books is how simple their production can be. There’s something quite punk about that. I can make something out very quickly in between films or projects that might take months or even years to complete — projects that often overflow with too much conceptualisation or complexity. I don’t know exactly why, but yes, books and zines are, for me, a simpler space of expression — a space where I allow myself more nonchalance.

SG It’s funny, because the conceptual complexity of your works seems inversely proportional to the simplicity and lightness with which you approach publishing.

VU Yeah, it’s strange. Books are probably one of my oldest fascinations — since childhood — but I never really sacralised it. On the other hand, yes, there’s something closer to sacralisation in my sculptural or installation work, which takes me a whole different amount of time. That said, I can feel this difference in rhythm slowly balancing out. I like the idea that, at some point, I'd make artworks more instinctively, more candidly, just as I could spend years working on a more substantial book. In the end, I think I build complex systems mostly to justify to myself the existence of the work that comes out of them. It’s something reassuring — something I do for me — but you also have to learn how to let go of that.

SG You build that complexity for yourself, but it’s still visible in the works. There’s always this strange feeling in your work — it’s like I’m looking at something that feels completely clear but seems to come from total mental chaos.

VU Yes, as if the complexity I put into the work serves simplicity. There’s this desire to find a kind of prosaic form within complex systems — something approachable.

SG Something “clear”, right? That’s what I feel when I look at the materiality and the construction of your works: anodized aluminium engraved with industrial precision, UV-printed glass framed in metal structures, technical leather embossed with mesh or neoprene… Nothing is left to chance. Everything is positioned, measured...

VU I want to be able to develop a system and then narrow it down, little by little, to something purely aesthetic or formal. That’s how I can enter into something… yes, something visually “clear”. I want people who stand in front of one of my works, if they’re drawn to it, to be able to simply “read” it. Not because I’m offering a truth or a clear message — that’s not the point — but because I want them to feel that there’s something to find there, and to form their own interpretation.

SG At the same time, there’s a strong sense of symbolism in your work. Looking at some of your works, like Peer Pressure for example, I feel like I’m reading a word in my mother language — a word that seems simple and intelligible — but that I somehow don’t understand.

VU I don’t know if I consciously use symbolism as a means of communication, or even as the end result of my work. But what’s certain is that symbolism is one of my tools. When I was working on the video Sunflowers, for example, I used symbolism to build a deliberately complex narrative network that allowed unexpected image associations. Like, at one point in the editing, I started from a shot of a dolphin jumping out of a pool in an amusement park. To understand how that shot could fit into the system I was composing, I had to study the chemical composition of chlorine — which led me to volcanology. Only then could I say, “Okay, actually, right after this, I can put that VHS documentary footage of Mount Etna.” You see, symbolism here works as a tool, not as an goal. I don’t want any symbolism that would function like a mystery or a riddle. If you include a bird in your work, or an image of a bird, depending on where you are in the world, the community you belong to, or the type of bird you use, an infinity of symbolic possibilities opens up. And that’s what interests me.

SG Yeah — you use symbolism as a kind of universal key to multiply interpretation, to open the floodgates of meaning. The symbol is like a drawer-image, and you don’t care what’s inside — you just want to keep the drawer open, so everything inside it remains accessible. It doesn’t stop you from using the image of a bird — on the contrary. What matters is its symbolic potential, its ability to carry endless meanings.

VU It’s funny we’re still talking about birds, but yes. And in the bird-object, there are so many other potential objects — from what a wingbeat represents, to the colour of a beak, to the texture of a cry. Every small element contains its own symbolic universe. The bird is a symbolic bomb. It even has a name — one we both know well: interobjectivity, the way Timothy Morton talks about it in his work on Object-Oriented Ontology.

SG Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. When symbolism becomes too esoteric, maybe it’s just that interobjectivity has taken over — and the human isn’t really able to grasp it anymore. The single word bird, or the simple image of a bird, becomes a trigger that sets off an entire world — and as many worlds as there are viewers standing in front of an object.

VU Exactly — I think it’s limitless. And that’s also the trap I set for myself. If you consider that everything is connected, and connectable, then from that point on you could just spend your whole life working — collecting footage, re-editing things, never releasing or showing anything — it’s endless.

SG For the same reason — interobjectivity — there’s no such thing as perfection. No edit that makes more sense than another. We’ll stop talking about birds, but still — it’s interesting that we’re talking so much about symbols, because I think there’s an element in your work that acts like a kind of cornerstone or Gordian knot: your relationship to the image. I feel like you have a conflicted relationship with the very concept of image. You hate its place in our reality system, but you love its strange charge, its energy. So, in your work, we often find this mix of images you’ve produced and others you’ve found.

VU Yeah — it’s a pure paradox, but not that hard to understand. A lot of us grew up consuming images to the point of nausea — and we still do. That disgust comes from obsession. It’s both psychoanalytic and inherited from Debord. I can’t really explain why, but for example, I find myself completely incapable of simply framing an image, hanging it on the wall, and calling it a day. To do that, I have to tell myself that images are propositions — and that the framing system cages them, confines them, places them under a sanctifying glass dome. A political proposition inside a “police” dispositif, to use Rancière’s terms — which I love.

SG That’s basically how you describe your series Trap — a simple series of framed photographs, but the way you talk about it, it sounds like sculpture. In the end, the trap is the device: anti-reflective glass, a German aluminium frame, conservation-grade Klug paper backing with neutral pH, an inkjet print on Hahnemühle cotton paper… Does the sacralisation of the image destroy its potential power?

VU Maybe, yes — at least for me, the sacralisation of the image is more problematic than the existence of the image itself. It would be silly to talk about “the danger of the image” — that’s way too broad — and many philosophers has approached it in fascinating ways, from Rancière to Agamben, Didi-Huberman to Debord. Is my vision an image? Is the memory of it an image as well? Can a physical object be considered an image? Can we physically get hurt by an image? I couldn’t say. But there’s still a consensus around the idea that our reality is dominated by the image — the printed, posted, streamed image, on every scale. The image as a weapon of mass communication; the image as icon.

SG That’s why an image in your work never comes alone, or whole — it always needs a material to rest on, a technique to exist through, a system to confront. The “clarity” I mentioned earlier probably comes from that — from the industrial smoothness of the materials you use: anodized aluminium, modular profiles, corrugated cardboard, glass…

VU There’s always an idea of structure involved when I think about materials. I like finding materials you could call “functional” — things that serve a system or a predefined structure — and then not respecting them for what they are. Whatever the scale, a structural system will always say a lot about the reality system it’s part of.

SG The material becomes a clue. When you print on aluminium profiles — structural elements commonly used in assembly lines — and they lose their original functionality, you’re questioning the very reason of a structure.

VU Yes, and that also questions the structure of the industry it partakes from. In my Landscape series, I use the deep horizontality of modular aluminium profiles as an actual landscape element, to erase part of the image. That idea doesn’t come from some abstract inspiration — the act of production is anchored in the real. I work with companies and ask them to do things that are unexpected, sometimes extreme for them. For Landscape, the focal limits of a UV printer head created this organic, diffused blur in the depths of the aluminium. By subverting the functionality of my materials, I force the whole production chain to subvert its own system too.

SG To produce is to make objects speak to each other. To make an image speak with a material, a material with a concept, an object with a machine. [looks at Victor’s computer] Okay, I can’t help noticing the dozens of YouTube tabs open on your browser. I want to understand what’s going on with that project — and how you’re working on it right now.

VU Alright, let’s go — it’s a big one [laughs]. For the past two or three months, I’ve been building a collection of images gathered from YouTube. I’m at around 1,500 now. Initially, it was research for a video called Prayers. Prayers, if I had to sum it up, is about how belief systems develop syncretically in exurban territories, and how they’re always caught between a desire for freedom and a kind of constant, cyclical fear. I wanted that syncretism to show up in the editing gesture itself: working with found images as a mirror of their subject. Prayers talks a lot about self-development, hybrid forms of belief — a bit of Christianity, a bit of Buddhism, a bit of Taoism, masculinist videos borrowing from Stoic thoughts, and so on. In the edit, that mix comes through the use of images that aren’t mine and come from thousands of different sources.

SG And those images have something in common, right? A specific territory?

VU Yeah — the exurbs, or the suburbs at least. The kind of territory I grew up in, and where you grew up too.

SG And it’s part of your whole aesthetic world. You can see it in Landscape, in some of the Slabs works. It’s almost an object in itself — even a hyperobject — because it’s spread everywhere across the world, but impossible to grasp as a single thing.

VU What interests me is how local identity has almost completely disappeared in those spaces. You could be in the suburbs of Sacramento, Paris, or in the Czech Republic, and you’d find the same elements, the same experiences, and a similar form of sacrality. It is so hard to find an identity key there that the individual who grows up in it ends up embodying capitalism and globalisation itself. It’s strange: everyone picks from the internet to build their individuality, but in the end, that individuality turns out being the same for everyone.

SG Can you give examples?

VU I often start from childhood memories. For instance, I look for videos of kids shooting at each other with airsoft guns. Then I scroll, I select the most obscure ones, open them in tabs — I’ve got hundreds. When a video catches my eye, I check what else that person has posted, then their comments, then the accounts of people who commented — and so on. It’s an infinite gesture.

SG But somehow organic, in the end — you’re unfolding a system.

VU Yes, and it helps me define structures. Sometimes I end up on the seventh or eighth person in a chain, with no link to the first. The first might be in Norway, the last in Italy — doesn’t matter. Between the two, I’ve passed through face-cam videos, guitar covers, neighbour arguments, unboxings… and then suddenly I’m back to airsoft! This way of searching helps me realise that my own experience is shared by so many others — I’m totally part of that system.

SG And these are invisible communities, strangely. The videos you select are often posted by people with almost no followers, no comments, barely any views. It’s that invisible mass of YouTube — fragmented, made up of millions of similar pieces of content, seen by no one.

VU Exactly. They’re communities. Recently I spent some time watching people who make fan reviews. The first guy I found was just filming a fan — not speaking — you could only hear the sound of the air, almost like the sea. These videos have maybe thirty to four hundred views. And often, it’s the same people commenting underneath. When you go to their profiles, you find other videos, other territories, other links with things I’ve already come across. It’s a network of micro-communities, each around a micro-niche of interest. It’s the same with inflatable Christmas decorations — a whole community. And then, digging into users’ playlists, I even came across unlisted videos showing kinky practices or fetishes around inflatable pool toys — usually orcas or whales. People rubbing against them, or puncturing them, dressed in latex, wearing hoods… The videos are endless, absurd.

SG What you’re describing reminds me of Lynch — those ultra-strange images that are still charged with reality. Like in Twin Peaks: The Return, when a middle-aged woman screams in her car while her kid throws up on the passenger seat, and a forest fire burns beside them. It’s unreal, but it’s real. What you find on YouTube feels the same. These videos reveal something uncanny within what we usually consider ordinary reality.

VU Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lynch also had hundreds of YouTube tabs open [both laugh]. You and I were talking about that back when he was posting his daily weather reports, his DIY tutorials, his little games of chance — he must have spent time in those corners of the Internet. What I like about these territories is that I ran away from them when I was seventeen. I didn’t want to go back — not physically, nor artistically. And now I want to return, to understand something about myself. These are global spaces where everything looks the same: houses, clothes, shops, materials… There’s a global protocol to them, with a few local variations, but overall, it’s the same structure. And within that sameness, you see strange things appear — desires, characters, experiences — things that are totally singular. When everything looks identical, the smallest anomaly becomes even stranger.

SG It sounds like you’re describing your entire body of work. When you think about Landscape, Sunflowers Studies, Peer Pressure, those are all built from structural, global, uniform materials, onto which you lay something strange. Each of those works could be seen as a highly symbolic vision of the suburbs — a smooth, evenly distributed base where, in some spots, something bizarre surfaces.

VU Yeah, exactly. The structures behind Prayers are very similar to my previous projects: system, protocol — and then letting small, instinctive things emerge.

SG Except that in this film, because you’re using found footage, you’re literally inside the system — it sticks to the camera. It feels like we’re inside the material itself, inside the hollow part of the aluminium profile, watching strange things happening from there. The suburbs are present but impossible to locate — you can only guess the houses, the roofs, the sky.

VU I don’t know if the territory is the main character, but there’s one constant in Prayers: the military jets flying over the houses. It’s a childhood memory — and again here, a globally shared childhood memory. When I was a kid and a fighter jet passed, I’d run to the window to see it — it was both a symbol of freedom and fear. I always wondered: where is it going? Is it going to bomb somewhere? In Prayers, it has become a kind of mechanical gesture. Whatever happens — desire, fear, anger, contemplation, self-improvement — it always ends up being erased by that plane, by that fear.

SG That’s fascinating. The plane triggers fear because it carries the trace of an external conflict — or just the presence of an elsewhere. These exurbs you show are isolated territories, always on the margins. When a plane passes, you know it doesn’t come from there, and it won’t stop there either.

VU Maybe that isolation is what makes those places fertile for strangeness. In a flat landscape, where all the houses look the same, the smallest detail stands out. People are alone, moving between fear, anger, desire, paranoia… The symptoms of a sickness that belongs to our whole system of reality.