Olivia Wunsche recently launched Vanguard Union Press, a magazine about creativity that takes a visual and physical cue from the sixties counter culture press, presenting one longform ‘visual interview’ each issue.

After studying graphic design, and later photography, at ECAL, Olivia works across many mediums including photography, collage, editorial design, digital painting, video, 3D, and installation. She produces Vanguard Union Press from her Brittany home, interviewing one artist every issue, in collaboration with her partner Thomas Le Provost, who designs the publication. The result is a rich peice of editorial design that smartly combines text and image to express its subjects work and views.

What are you doing this morning? 
Mornings are my favourite time, and my routine hasn’t changed in years. It’s the one time of day when I like to be left the fuck alone—my family knows this little window is untouchable, and whenever someone dares to take that away from me, I turn into a flamethrower.
    

My morning protocol is pretty boring, though. I wake up, make a coffee, and then prepare either French crepes (which I’m helplessly addicted to) or porridge with some fruits from our garden. Breakfast is always paired with a book, a documentary, or an interview. I like to start the day not just by filling my stomach, but also by giving my mind some kind of stimulating, invigorating fuel. Reading something uplifting, or hearing someone say some inspiring idea, helps set the momentum for the rest of the day. It re-centres my sense of “purpose”—however pretentious that might sound—and actually motivates me.
   

Today, for example, I’m watching ‘The Seeds of Vandana Shiva’—a documentary about the Indian ecofeminist activist Vandana Shiva, who challenged the agrochemical and seed-patenting industries in a truly spectacular way. She also fought against the privatization of land and natural resources, and defended the rights and independence of small-scale farmers with such ferocity. This lady is a badass. A true role model. I’d love to interview her someday.

Describe your work environment
I work from home, and my environment is exactly how I need it to be for my mind and creativity to function properly. My partner, our dog and I live in a countryside house on the coast of Brittany. On stormy days, we can hear the ocean waves crashing onto the shore, and in the summer, we wake up to incredible bird symphonies. Every morning, we look out at the tall, old pine trees in the background. 

Our garden is full of flowers, nut trees, fruits, and vegetables—most of which we have planted for the first time this year. We share it with our dear neighbours, who’ve become good friends. They helped us build the greenhouse and get everything into the soil. Doing it as a communal project, sharing it with people you appreciate, makes it way cooler.   

The beauty and quality of this environment is an enormous privilege, and I’m incredibly grateful for it. I wish more people had the chance to live close to nature and get to know its mind-blowing processes, to be a bit more in tune with it. To breathe clean air, eat healthy food, and be embedded in a local community. I know it’s changed the way I feel, the way I think, and the way I relate to the world around me. And I can absolutely see how it fuels my creative process. I probably avoided multiple burnouts precisely because of this place. I love it here.

Which magazine do you first remember?
I think it was a photography magazine published by Miedzy Nami Cafe in Warsaw, sometime in the late nineties or early 2000’s—I don’t remember exactly. I don’t think I really understood what the magazine was about back then, but looking at it now, I can see how artistically ahead of its time it was, especially in a post-communist Poland where I grew up. 
    

In a country still shaped by religious conservatism and a suspicion of anything outside of traditional values, this magazine—or this iconic place—provided space for creative avant grade and alternative identities; that alone made it very special. It was a low-key safe haven for Warsaw’s gay and queer community. My mum used to take me there often as a kid. I was lucky to grow up in that kind of interesting and open-minded environment, surrounded by our chosen family of gay aunts and uncles. I get so nostalgic just thinking about it!

Aside from yours, what’s your favourite magazine/zine?
I’d rather highlight an entire genre: the radical underground press of the 1960s. That wave of countercultural publishing has been a major influence on my own project.
    These magazines weren’t just commenting on politics or social upheavals—they were actively participating in grassroots movements. They exposed government corruption and corporate abuse, and gave a platform to alternative narratives and causes that were mostly ignored—or even suppressed—by the mainstream media: the anti-war and environmental movements, civil rights, gay liberation, feminism, or the LSD-tripping hippies who refused to participate in what they saw as a broken, destructive system. The underground press provided information for community organizing, coordinated protest marches, and announced social service programs.
    

What I like most is the non-conformist sense of freedom and rawness built into the DNA of these publications. They broke so many rules of conventional journalism and design — both highly critical and highly creative. If I had to name a specific title, I’d choose SHOTS: Photographs from the Underground Press. It’s a retrospective, but it captures the revolutionary spirit of those times really well—protests, police violence, countercultural life. It’s a great example of how image-making was used as a tool to challenge oppressive power structures. 
    

There’s also a very cool Paris-based project called The Radical Media Archive—a foundation dedicated to preserving and sharing alternative press, graphic publications, revolutionary art, and utopian design. They’ve recently published the first volume of ‘Anthology of Counterculture and Political Graphic Design,’ spanning over 300 pages.
  

 I look up to the visual culture of that era, which played a huge role in shaping political consciousness.

What other piece of media would you recommend?
Definitely Tangentially Speaking, a podcast hosted by author and researcher Chris Ryan. He often records episodes while traveling in his camper van, alternating between solo rants and guest interviews. His life trajectory is really interesting: he studied English and American literature, then pursued doctoral research in psychology—but eventually realised he didn’t want to become a detached, intellectual snob preaching from an ivory tower about life without actually living it. So he spent 20 years traveling the world, living among different cultures, and exploring alternative lifestyles. He’s taken on the kind of jobs that sound like movie plots—gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to sex workers in Bangkok and self-defence to land reform activists in Mexico, or managing commercial real-estate in New York’s Diamond District.
    

This dude is someone I really look up to. His books genuinely changed how I live my life. He cuts through the endless layers of conventional social norms and superficial bullshit that dominate popular culture. His work explores things like human nature and the structure of civilisation, often through the lens of psychology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology. He shares insights into how we live and relate to one another—but without taking himself too seriously. There’s a lot of humour, a lot of depth and curiosity. Sometimes listening to his podcast feels like having a mental kin who verbalises my inner world or perspective on reality—just 100 times smarter. It’s the kind of mentorship I never had access to in real life.

Describe Vanguard Union Press in three words
Subversive, useful, cross-disciplinary  


How do you select the interviewees for the magazine?
My only real criteria is genuine curiosity—I have to be interested in the person and feel like they have something valuable or thought-provoking to say. The rest is often just serendipity: one unexpected encounter leads to another—right place, right time—and then it feels like the next guest just reveals him or herself as a natural consequence of these chain reactions, as something obvious.
    

So far, the interviews have taken on a long-term form, lots of back and forth. In the case of Hania Rani, for example, it took us a year of continuous conversations, wine glasses and city walks, which eventually turned into a friendship. This format gives me the time to really get to know and understand the person—to detect the threads that make up their soul and that could eventually find their way into a more tangible form. I didn’t want this project to follow the fast-food formula of “this or that” questions and quick, half-hearted answers. Quality needs time and space to mature.
    

Another idea behind the magazine is to be cross-disciplinary: to bring together voices from different fields that wouldn’t normally end up in the same room. And then, if I’m being totally honest, speaking to someone who already has a bit of a platform or following does help get the project seen. If I’d start by interviewing an anonymous scientist working from a secret research lab hidden in some nameless village in southern Lithuania… That’s not exactly a winning strategy for a new magazine. (Even though I absolutely want that too, just a bit later.)
    

But fame on its own doesn’t interest me. It only becomes valuable when it’s attached to something meaningful—something that opens minds, shifts perspectives, triggers change. My intention is to extract what hasn’t been extracted yet. To make something useful out of it. To plant little thought-seeds in the reader’s mind. 
My next guest is the artist and designer who’s work I greatly admire—Ronan Bouroullec.

The magazine has a unique fold-out format. How did you conceive that?
Credit for the fold-out format goes to my partner, Thomas Le Provost—he came up with the idea and designed the whole thing. He rightly pointed out that it needed to be easily mailable. I also didn’t want the zine to feel disposable or ephemeral, so we included posters you can pull out and put up on your wall once you’ve finished reading the interview.
    

The idea was to give the object a longer life—something that lasts, not something to just be read and tossed. I also wanted to make art and visual culture more accessible across socio-economic backgrounds—to distribute work that’s usually locked behind gallery walls or institutional gatekeeping. I think it’s important to surround yourself—your living space—with beauty and art, regardless of your income. It’s a shame that’s become such an elitist, bourgeoise niche.

You’re a trained graphic designer; why didn’t you design the magazine ?
It’s true, I was lucky to graduate from one of the best graphic design bachelor programs at ECAL. But during my studies, I realised I had neither the patience nor the talent for it. I probably set a class record for the shittiest grades across three years. It wasn’t until the diploma project—the only time we had total creative freedom and no imposed briefs or constraints—that I finally did something I actually felt quite proud of: an experimental film. It’s funny how the moment I stepped away from graphic design, I could finally spread my wings and make something strong. 
    

It just never felt like a fully adequate medium for what I wanted to express. It was too rigid, too technical. There were always rules—use this typeface, that format, this subject matter, those colors, this medium… Teachers or future clients policing your decisions. That’s absolutely fine for the field, it’s how design works in a way—but it frustrated me. The focus was always on form, rarely on content. I found way more freedom and joy in making images, and went on to do a master’s in photography instead.
 

Now, weirdly, the two disciplines are in constant dialogue in my personal practice. I still enjoy using graphic design—but only when I’m the captain of my own ship, when I’m not being forced into it.

Please show us one spread that sums up how the magazine works, and gives a sense of what the reader can expect from the mag
On the left page, you can see half of the poster (one of four in total)—a photo Hania Rani took of the control room at Polish Radio. It’s beautiful. The zine is loosely assembled without any stitching, so you can pull the posters out easily without damaging the paper.

Then, on the right, there’s a giant quote extracted from the interview, sitting right next to the regular, small-sized running text. It was important for me to highlight certain punchlines which would force the reader to immediately engage with the content of our conversation. You’ll also find smaller photographs showing either the interviewee or glimpses of their work and life environment. 
    

And although you can’t see it here, there’s also a full-spread reference plate—a kind of free-floating collage of their inspirations: books, films, music, art, places, activities… it can be anything. I find it’s a deep, expansive way to show someone’s inner world—sometimes more revealing than their answers to my questions.


What has publishing magazines taught you that may be helpful to anyone else planning to launch one?
It’s still early—I’ve only published two issues so far. But what I’ve learned is that working on this kind of project is one of the best ways to do just that: to learn. It’s been like a second education I gave myself. Preparing for interviews, doing the research, and then absorbing so much from the conversations themselves—it’s honestly the best school I could imagine.

I never had a traditional academic education, and for a long time that made me feel inadequate, or even plain stupid—like I didn’t have the intellectual toolkit that others seemed to get from university. But over time, I realised that this insecurity came from a cultural script that puts intellectuals on a pedestal—as if academic knowledge is somehow superior, more legitimate, or more valuable. But that’s utter bullshit.

After coming across the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I started to understand how intellectual authority is often tied to class domination—and how society tends to dismiss other kinds of knowledge: like emotional intelligence, traditional know-how passed down through generations, rural or land-based practices, or folk wisdom that comes from living closely with nature. The kind of deep, intuitive understanding of reality that often gets overlooked just because it doesn’t come with a god damn diploma. 

That helped me let go of the complex. Now I try to stay curious and engaged with knowledge, but in my own, relaxed way—combining it with making things, through experience. I’m learning to identify wild plants,  how to use a screwdriver, how to cut and sand wood, how to plant vegetables, how to be connected to my local community. Which I don’t want to romanticise, it’s not always easy. But it’s all part of the same process for me now. All elements are equally important.

What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
Watching our tomatoes finally ripen, and getting my hands on a book I ordered: ‘William Blake vs The World’ by John Higgs.. Blake was a mystic rebel who made decisions based on his own conscience, not on social expectations. And he was willing to accept the consequences of staying true to himself—or to some higher ideal: poverty, social ridicule, rejection by the art establishment, and often a deep sense of loneliness. A true non-conformist for his time. He was also a pioneer of self-publishing—mixing text and image, and producing everything himself with the help of his wife. He’s a big inspiration, although I’m not sure I’d be ready to walk the same painful road of the starving artist the way he did. 

vanguardunionpress.com