Author name: Odalisque

Teklan x Layered: A Continued Exploration of Color and Form text Ulrika Lindqvist photography Andy Liffner Known for her bold use of color and immersive spatial design, Stockholm-based designer Tekla Evelina Severin, or Teklan, has built a practice that bridges interiors, architecture, and visual storytelling. In this interview, she shares her creative process, recent highlights, and the inspiration behind her latest collaboration with Layered. Ulrika Lindqvist: Hi Tekla, can you share how long you’ve been working as an interior designer and what inspired you to start your career in this field? Tekla Evelina Severin: I graduated in 2010 from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, specializing in Interior Architecture and Furniture Design, and have been working in the field ever since. During the first few years, I worked as a more traditional interior architect at an architectural firm. 2015 I took my first baby steps towards my current direction, and founded my own studio and multidisciplinary practice, working through the language of colour. My inspiration to start my own practice came from a longing for something beyond the prevailing conformity in design and CMF-design at that time.  (And my initial inspiration for becoming a spatial designer in the first place, came from a desire to create new immersive experiences and meaningful environments that stand the test of time, as all good designs should.) UL: Have there been any particular projects or events in your career that stand out as especially memorable? TES: Yes, many , and every project have its own magic, but creating ”an apartment of one’s own” for Spanish furniture company sancal during Milan design week 2022 was definitively a highlight in every way.  The wholehearted creative trust from the magic sisters behind the family company, the generous support of co-collaborators like Huguet Mallorca who brought my wild, customised design ideas to life, the patient care of builders and visionary project leaders, the spatial unfolding of my creative vision – and, finally, the overwhelming response from both visitors and press.  Another unexpected highlight is the ongoing journey of my tile collection Färgblock. What began as a simple design has evolved over the years, expanding with new finishes and formats and finding its way into projects around the world. Each day I encounter it in new contexts, and it’s delightful to witness how seamlessly it inhabits so many different styles UL: Can you walk us through your creative process? Do you have any specific routines or practices that help spark your creativity? TES: I have no problem with finding inspiration, I have rather the opposite problem, to find enough time to fulfill all my ideas. My creative process is quite straightforward, unfolding in several clear stages. It begins with an in-depth analysis of the client, the brief, the premises, and the space itself. From there, I move on to shaping an atmosphere—creating mood boards, researching materials, and developing colour schemes. In the next phase, I translate these ideas into concrete form through 3D sketches and presentations. This is followed by technical drawings for manufacturers and builders, enabling both budgeting and, ultimately, production. Once production begins, I focus on styling research, followed by on-site supervision and personal involvement to ensure that every detail is realised as intended UL: What does a typical day look like for you as an interior designer? TES: There is no such thing as a typical day. Also, since most of my  clients are international, I often work abroad. My time is divided between developing or refining new CMF designs, moving through different stages of interior and exhibition projects, directing or styling upcoming collaborations, and—like now—giving interviews, talks, and behind-the-scenes insights ahead of various launches UL: How do you use rugs and carpets in your interior design? TES: Often, it’s a rug or carpet that allows the room to truly “land.” Beyond anchoring the space, it also adds a softness to the atmosphere and dynamic through material and texture, while naturally improving the acoustics UL: This is you second collaboration with Layered, how does it feel to return? TES: I wouldn’t really call it a return, since our last collaboration was quite recent and the collection is still available and doing well. That said, it’s always a pleasure to be ‘back’ and to continue building on what we’ve created together. In one sense, the process feels easier now that we know each other so well. But in another, it is more demanding—to move forward, to push boundaries, and to somehow outshine the collection that came before. UL: How did you choose the location for the campaign shoot, Villa Volman in Prague?  TES: For many reasons, the architecture offered a wonderful palette of matching colours, clean geometrical shapes, and strong perspectives, all of which harmonised beautifully with their collection. There is also something about the spirit of modernism—it feels timeless, while at the same time resonating with my own nostalgic fondness, I often refer to this phenomena as ”newstalgia” UL: What was your inspiration for this collection? It starts where your first collaboration “prism collection” ended, but where did you find the inspiration for this one? TES. Both the collections carry the same creative vision present in all my work: a fascination with the meeting point between two and three dimensions, where perspective shifts and optical illusions emerge—clearly reflected in both Diagonal and Labyrinth DiagonalDiagonal is an homage to one of my dearest patterns: the stripe. Here, reinterpreted diagonally with a darker contour line, it creates an optical shadow effect that emphasizes direction and adds an extra “bam” to the expression. The blue and brown/burgundy pairing is one of my signature combinations—what I like to call “something flirty and something dirty”—a balance where lightness meets depth and earthiness. For the second colourway, I wanted a more graphic and stylistic feel, but with warmth, so I added ochre brown to create richness and comfort. LabyrinthLabyrinth reflects one of my most beloved spatial layouts; in fact, I often build my room installations as labyrinths of different sequences. Here, it appears

The real thing with Tianyi Sun text Thea Voyles Tianyi Sun in her studio Human memory is an elastic thing. An expanding bag of tricks, the contents jumbled and lint-coated, altered with every blind fumble inside. Our memories come out slightly different each time, false relics perhaps, but still sacred. Computer memory, on the other hand, is a commodity, a static series of ones and zeroes, a brittle shard of data. We trust it more fully than our own, elevating its contents—sharp, clean, and barely pixelated—to fact. But what about the data that gets lost? That slips through the cracks of an ordered system?   Tianyi Sun doesn’t trust her computer memory. Or rather, she wants to see what data might be hidden between a chart’s gleaming headings. As one of two artist residents in Cornell Tech’s prestigious Backslash program—‘funding artists whose practices are nonlinear, unconventional, unexpected, adventurous, intense, surprising, questionable, and primed for engagement with new technologies’—Sun is on this hunt from within. Backslash’s program manager explained that they seek candidates leading in their field who “escape the norm.” Sun was chosen for her “deep engagement with the tech, not just as a means to an end but to understand the processes behind parsing the data.” Tianyi Sun. BADWIZARD, 2020 – ongoing. Interactive browser-based application / Multi-Channel Video TV: Your work is very tactile, it engages with the senses—not just sound and language, but heat and smell–which is unexpected when dealing with digital technology.  TS: There’s an illusion that digital technology is distant from the human or the body. But our responses to  what we experience through technology—synthesis, copies, mediation—are bodily, visceral. I’m interested in the affect that ‘technology’ facilitates, the way that we still react to something, ‘real’ or not.  TV: We are obsessed with differentiating between the synthesized version, or a copy, and the real thing. In the art world especially, we give an artwork value because it is a great example of, or the pinnacle of an artist’s work. In a way, data and AI make that kind of singular thinking impossible. In a society that’s built around the idea of something definitive, we now have all this technology that is continuously generating copies.  TS:  I was thinking a lot about this idea of authenticity as being algorithmic. If you think about how you verify an artwork’s authenticity, you pretty much measure it against a set of norms: if the time of creation, or the material, or the gesture matches, it is authentic, “real”. Yet how do you create and come to these gauges, these systems of measurement? Sometimes our gauge of what is most real or authentic is often our first interaction with it, but what happens when that is an interaction mediated by or replicated through technology? I grew up in the UK, and my experience with, as an example, orange chicken, is both authentic and inauthentic. It isn’t part of a historical cultural heritage, yet this “Chinese food” feels very nostalgic to me, as I ate it growing up, and my emotional connection is real. Nothing is ‘authentic’ anymore—no one true thing, which is why our emotional responses to technology are important. TV: Emotion is always sort-of deemed to be authentic, so when we have emotional connections to things, they become endowed with authenticity. If we perceive someone as authentic, they’re being genuine. We trust them. Or you know, an authentic restaurant is not catering to a tourist audience; it’s about not being tricked. Nostalgia is authentic, but memories are tricky. How are you exploring memory at Cornell Tech? TS: I am working on a continuation of a project I started in 2020, BADWIZARD. The name comes from the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy finds out that the wizard was fake and calls him a bad man, he responds, ‘I’m a good man, but I’m a bad wizard,’ because he failed to fool her. That’s pretty much what computers are, or what technology is, or even, I would say, what memory is. We think we have certain points in our lives that we really capture, but when reconstructing the memory, you are really making a lot of things up. You conjure the most coherent version, based on the context, or the time, or your emotions.  The pandemic hit Asia much earlier than it did the US. When it hit the US, I felt like my present folded back on itself. I had the same conversations—going through the same fear and anxiety, seeing the same images in the media—with a new group of people that I had with family and friends in China a year earlier. In BADWIZARD, I collected a lot of data—chat logs from friends, diaries, images—and condensed all of these ‘data-points’ into an interactive browser-based narrative where you’re able to navigate through short little vignettes. Some of the events are real, some of them are fake, or could feel real, but might not have actually happened.  Data is often used as an illusion of reality—something that’s real, something that happened. It’s seen as static, true, perfect. But when you think about what data is, it doesn’t mirror reality—it mirrors our ways of describing, valuing, and interpreting reality.  It is not fact, more rhetoric, narrative, performance even. Tianyi Sun. BADWIZARD, 2020 – ongoing. Interactive browser-based application / Multi-Channel Video. TV: Cool. How is the project evolving?  TS: I am taking the project further at Cornell Tech. I shifted from approaching the subject matter from a very personal point of time [angle] to investigate how similar data and narrative really are. AI takes information from all of the data points and then regurgitates it back to you and we are very reliant on these processes, it’s seen as almost this hand of truth. At the same time, users are more aware that much of our experiences are mediated through data; before ChatGPT or AI became so accessible, there was less of an awareness or curiosity on how and where data comes to be. TV: