Interview: Romain Gavras & Surkin on Visions of 2034

Gener8ion discuss building the world of Visions of 2034.

Visions of 2034, the ongoing exhibition at 180 Studios, sees Romain Gavras and Surkin, aka Gener8ion, explore a not-too-distant future from the margins of society.

The collaborative pair, responsible for the massively successful "Storm" featuring Yung Lean, have crafted a multiverse where the likes of Charlize Theron, 070 Shake, Jamie xx and many more play a role in a dystopian world where much is different but many things remain the same.

Elevating music videos beyond a promotional tool and into a starring role, Gener8ion's work is reimagining the methodology of the form by crafting videos and music that are directly in conversation with one another from the first step of the process. Each of their videos refuses to pander to the attention economy of short-form content and instead opts for narratively rich, expansive scenarios that unfurl with impressive scope and rich detail.

On the eve of the exhibition's launch, VF sat down with Gavras and Surkin to discuss the world-building of Visions of 2034, the appeal of "Storm" and much more.

The exhibition is called Visions of 2034. That's quite a specific year – not too far off, but in the future. How did you land on it?

Romain Gavras: The specific year is totally random, but the idea was to have a date that is set in the near future. We didn't want to do something that's very far in the future, but to have visions and glimpses and to build the mythology of a near future that is close enough.

How would you sum up some of the perspectives of Visions of 2034? What stories did you want to focus on?

RG: The whole idea, because it's linked with music, is impressions more than a very specific narrative. It's like the way mythology works, but retroactively, because we're talking about the future. It's mostly glimpses through the cracks of the culture, not necessarily robots or the things that you would expect. The videos are more about some stuff that remains timeless, like, for example, kids being kids and ideologies getting dumber and dumber. It's looking at the near future through a diagonal angle that is not necessarily the expected, and is linked to culture, behaviours and patterns.

Surkin: It's about small cultural dissonances, and it's close enough so that we can still relate to the actual characters in every video. It's almost like chapters around the world and trying to use those fragments to paint a bigger picture. It's also up to the imagination of people. We don't want to tell them too much.

RG: It's like if you did a retrospective on a year — let's say, 2001 — you would have this historical event, this specific moment in a school and so on. We're trying to create that ensemble imagery, a cartography of the world in the near future. Some videos are set in Kazakhstan, some in England, some in the US and one in China. We're painting a map of the world through those little cultural dissonances that can happen in the future.

S: It's also a discussion with pop culture and what's happening right now in the world and trends, and the way people are dressed. Some are dressed exactly the same, for instance, in the "Storm" video, it's kids wearing uniforms. It's as much about things that will stay the same as the things that change.

The exhibition opened the same day as the album was released. Can you talk to me a little bit about the relationship between the album and the exhibition?

RG: Since the beginning, the idea was to do videos for the album. The music and the images come togeher and we always wanted to do more than just music videos, and have some live on the internet, and then a really different format lives in a physical space like this [180 Studios].

When you come here to watch the "Storm" video featuring Yung Lean, it's a very different format than the version from the internet, because it has two screens and the length is different. The sensation you get is very different.

S: Obviously we want to have the Gener8ion project exist in a lot of different spaces – here, it's an exhibition but it's also an album that's going to be released more traditionally. We want to use the different formats and try to push them as far as we can. A music album is still one of the formats where you can really get people's attention, so there's a conversation between the traditional album format and the exhibition format.

For a lot of people, music videos are thought of as being created after the music has been completed. What's that process like for you? Is there an interplay while the songs are being written and the videos are being planned?

S: As you said, usually a music director is going to arrive with a fully mastered song and maybe you can extend it a little bit or do things like that but, most of the time, the music is already made. With us, everything is created at the same time. Sometimes Romain comes in the studio and I'm going to have just a tiny bit of a song, and be like, "Oh, this is good, maybe we can do this" and we build everything at the same time.

RG: It's very intertwined. Coming from the music video world, at some point I discovered that I was mainly making music videos only for people that I knew and that I could have a conversation with, but it still felt limited. With Surkin, we've worked on the music for my last two films now and over the last eight years, we've been conversing about ideas so it's a constant dialogue that makes it more interesting in terms of world-building.

S: Nothing is really set in stone at any point during the process. The music can evolve until the last minute, and the video is going to influence the way I'm gonna build a song. We have a freedom that I think is not very common. It's very rare that an artist decides to, let's say, change the BPM of a song because the video doesn't work. It's a very unique process.

The video to "Storm" was a massive success online. Was that something you anticipated when you were creating the project? Why do you think it connected with people so strongly?

RG: Putting out a 6 minute and 30 seconds music video in 2026, it's hard to think that people are going to rush to see it when everyone watches one-minute reels on their telephone. I think people connected with the intent of doing something where it feels free and radical in terms of filmmaking, where the punchline comes at minute four of a long video. The internet did what it does best and took the video, made it its own, recut it, put fragments of it out there. I think that's part of the conversation.

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On YouTube, with videos like "Storm" video and Jamie xx's "Gosh", there's many comments about the attention to detail with the choreo and discussions of AI not being able to make something that looks as good. Do you think the level of detail and craft is one of the reasons why people are drawn to it?

S: We cannot really compete with kids doing extremely efficient videos in 10 seconds. I mean, we're kind of old now. We don't have that in our blood. Basically, at one point, we were like, instead of trying to compete with TikTok kids, let's just do what we do best and not compromise. If you ask any label in the world, they would be like, "Do not do that. Do not release a video that long."

RG: To answer the AI question, I think you can still feel AI when you see it. Maybe not for long, but now you still feel it. AI is also part of the conversation in the exhibition. We have an unseen film with Charlize Theron that we shot five years ago that is going to be released on the internet, but there's a specific version in the exhibit. The video of an emotion capture device used for AI to recreate Hollywood actors but we actually shot her. That's part of the conversation — is it AI, what is it?

Back to the "Storm" video, when something's done with energy and everyone is really into what they're making, and doesn't make any compromises, you feel it on screen. You feel that we shot on film, on 16 millimetre, that we had amazing choreography by Damien Jalet, and that all those amazing young dancers gave 100%. I feel that the audience sees it and feels it.

This is your first time back in 180 Studios since featuring in Future Shock. How does it feel to be coming back with your own full exhibition?

RG: Well, we're very excited, because it's the first time that all these pieces are shown together. Before, at Future Shock, we had one piece. It was the same in Pinault Foundation in Paris and at the Onassis Centre in Athens. I really think coming here and watching them all together, you really get a sense of the world that we're trying to build.

S: People have seen pieces of the puzzle, it's the first time people are going to see the whole picture. It's very exciting.

Visions of 2034 runs at 180 Studios until July 26. Book tickets now.