Anyone hoping to be converted to the Wilson ’cause’ should be warned that what follows may not offer such an opportunity. In conversation, the twins do not provide impressive words and lofty analyses. Indeed, listening to them talk about their work, you get the impression you could hand them a history of golf clubs and they’d thrive on it for weeks. What is most striking in their conversation is an evangelical zeal for minor detail. Trying to fathom why they chose Westminster as the location for Parliament, you get nothing but anecdotes: the trials of gaining film access, the labyrinthine nature of its corridors, a doddery old lord they saw there, the periscope at the top of the Commons, when it was built, when it was rebuilt, etc. And not a lot else.

So you have to read between the lines. This reluctance to overtheorise their work is what has enabled others to load so much onto their work instead: to the point where Crawl Space becomes the very incarnation of the Freudian uncanny, Stasi and Gamma replicate the very structure of Bentham’s Panopticon, and the buildings they choose to film become the very symbol of Foucauldian ‘power’. At the other extreme, you can drain them of theory altogether and see the Wilsons as image-driven urban chic trendies, purveyors of a perfect late-90s Wallpaper* aesthetic - albeit with an ironic ’spooky’ edge.

Since Lisa Corrin is taking the former point of view in her Serpentine catalogue interview, I tackle the latter interpretation of the ‘twins as package’, and Jane is immediately troubled. They’ve heard their videos compared to pop promos, but as for the Stasi photographs as fashion shoot fodder, they are horrified. “Hang on, those chairs are from a Stasi prison, not Wallpaper* magazine!”, she protests. “We go to the real locations where the spaces do exist, and if we’d gone in and arranged those chairs like a Wallpaper* spread fair enough, but it’s a document and that’s not Wallpaper* magazine at all. That annoys me. It’s something we’re very conscious of, never going in and intruding too much and not doing what magazines do, which is to fetishise things. We hold back from it. The whole point when we’re shooting is that we don’t go in and say ‘oh, can I move it just like so’, we just leave it. People who say the photographs look like Wallpaper* should pay a bit more attention.”