Life Cycles 2026 / 2027 · Roots
Artist in Residence
Silvan Borer
Silvan Borer is the TEDxZurich Artist in Residence for the Life Cycles season 2026/27. Zurich-based multidisciplinary artist specialises in creative content, illustration and visual storytelling. His work combines forward-thinking design with strong artistic direction and integrated visual concepts, spanning illustration, animation and furniture design.
Ahead of the season's first event, ROOTS, we joined him at Bürkliplatz market on an autumnal Tuesday morning, where he was seeking inspiration in root vegetables and the natural world around him. He drew on these and similar impressions in his work for TEDxZurich.
Silvan finds inspiration in the regular things that are often overlooked: the details of everyday life, the colours, and forms of nature. A beetroot. A market stall. A Tuesday. For him, being rooted is less about where you come from than about paying attention to the world that is right around you.
Tuesday, Bürkliplatz
It is one of the first days of autumn, and the sun comes in low over the lake, catching everything at once: the crates, the awnings, the soil still clinging to the roots. The stalls are full. ROOTS of every shape and colour, laid out with a care that is easy to overlook.
We start our conversation with a simple question: “Why are the vendors produce presentation so appealing?” Silvan takes his time with the answer.
Trivial Things
“It is something trivial,” he says, “and yet it makes me so excited to go to the market and look for vegetables.” What excites him is proximity. You stand close to the people who grew what you buy. You hold something whose ROOTS you can actually follow, back to a field, a person, a season. In a city where most things arrive without a past, that feels like a connection.
Silvan partly grew up on a farm, and he admits that today city life mostly keeps him at a distance from nature. What has stayed is a fascination with how organic things are built: the branching, the textures, the irregular forms of things that grow underground. Even on this morning, between the stalls, we found a few visual case studies for ROOTS.
On his ROOTS
His path into art did not start in a studio. Before studying illustration at ZHdK, Silvan worked as a gardener. It is an unlikely beginning for an illustrator, and a revealing one. The hands that draw learned first to plant.
That first career never really ended. Working with nature remains a root of his practice and a constant source of inspiration. ROOTS, the opening event of the Life Cycles season, asks where we come from and what holds us in place. For Silvan, the answer lies close to the ground. His expression, through illustration and visual storytelling, finds beauty and meaning in the simple things in nature.
The studio
The morning ends in his studio in Zürich's Kreis 4. Silvan designed the furniture himself, and it shows: the room feels made rather than furnished. It is a space built for working and creating together.
The vegetables go onto the table, and he starts to draw. One at a time, paying attention to the often unused and irregular parts most people cut off. The fine hairs of a root. The scar where a leaf once was. The way nothing that grows in the ground is ever quite symmetrical.
By the end of the morning, the market became a page of drawings. The trivial, looked at long enough, turns out to be plenty.
Silvan's inspirations, from his ROOTS to his life experiences, come together at TEDxZurich, where his work is leaving a visible mark. His creative input can be experienced throughout both the website and Life Cycles season programming.
The Artist in Residence at TEDxZurich
The Artist in Residence initiative celebrates Zurich's creative community by bringing local artistic talent into the TEDxZurich experience. It creates space for collaboration, experimentation and co-creation, allowing art and ideas to meet across disciplines.
Throughout the Life Cycles season, the initiative gives an artist the time and platform to develop their creative practice in dialogue with TEDxZurich's themes, people and programme. Their work becomes part of the season's identity, enriching the experience beyond the stage and creating new points of connection with our community.
The TEDxZurich Residence is an evolving initiative that aims at extending beyond the arts to embrace a broader range of disciplines, expertise and creative practices over time.
- Photographer Linq Sinq
- Creative Direction David Menzi