Save Our Souls: Temps Perdu

(adam štěch) The studio of Save our souls has presented a very pronounced attitude to the design of interior objects since its founding in 2005. Shapes and functional dispositions that look very simple at first sight conceal an above-standard conceptual record of reality.

The Swedish designer duo of Johannes Carlström and Magdalena Nilsson from Stockholm rank among the new generation of Swedish designers who have managed to follow up the tradition of the humanistically pure design of Scandinavian modernism, which they have enriched with a significant artistic and conceptual extra meaning. Front, Jens Fager, Malina Lundmark, Katarina Häll, Folkform, and Save our souls design in a way that we could label as „pure concept“. The superstructure in the form of conceptual meanings never appears in their work to the exclusion of pure and elegant forms. The new collection by Save our souls is currently exhibited at the Eskilstuna Art Museum and represents the latest expression of young Swedish conceptual design.

Each collection by Save our souls is different and specific, e.g. the Lightflashes that played with the theme of lightning and its translation into a furniture form or the FFFOK series that commented on several social taboos. The latest project, entitled Temps Perdu (Time Lost), focuses on time and its specific “designer reification” in the form of a collection of six interior objects. “We have created a furniture collection that bears a certain nostalgic touch and is based on the combination of traditional manufacturing methods with cheap modern materials,” explain the designers.

Thus, the furniture collection, containing a stool, a chair, a writing table, a small table, and two lights, reflects upon our perception of time in general and its various perceptions in the past and at present. Each object can be viewed from a certain angle as a specific letter in the word “temps”, which means “time” in French. Thus, the furniture becomes a specific element that has stopped in time between the past and the present. Abundant use of such materials such as prefabricated steel and brass give the collection a contemporary, industrial look; hand-painted wood, folded paper, and sand-blasted glass, on the other hand, symbolically return the objects several decades back to when human work tended to be more precious and, of course, required more time than today.

The designers succeeded in creating a functionalist-looking object with a powerful emotional mettle. The P-lamp is probably the most interesting part of the collection. It is a floor lamp in the form of the letter “P” that combines an industrial brass stand with a round shade made from sand-blasted glass and folded paper. The “T” table is made from Swedish pine wood and painted with traditional Japanese ink. Its shape is characterized by its leg, which is reminiscent of a string of drops caught in time. The minimalist Dot-lamp, made from brass, is also part of the Temps Perdu series. This lamp represents a symbolic full stop following the word Temps and maybe even from the era when a word had a significantly different dimension than in this hurried world.

Adam Štěch is a Dolce Vita magazine edito

< back