IMMINENT DETOUR

Imminent Detour / Andreea Samoilă (1996,RO) is a visual artist interested in objects, words and tools after they depart from the "manual" version of themselves.

She works under the name Imminent Detour to give a nod to memory palaces, and because she is in no rush to get to the point.


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IMMINENT DETOUR

Andreea Samoilă (1996,RO) is a visual artist, and an independent editor & art director of printed matter. She is interested in objects, words and tools after they depart from the "manual" version of themselves.

She makes objects, books and actions focussing on witty uses of objects, unexpected associations and word-play. Andreea works under the name Imminent Detour, giving a nod to memory palaces, imaginary spaces and times in which to anchor new information.

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100 Interventions & Observations


The bread and butter of my day-to-day way of thinking: being drawn to observe spatial and visual relations between things, people, words and gestures, and then making (material) interventions or just observations, in order to have a conversation with contexts I observed. Collated in this format with the works in no particular order. The number 100 is more of a suggestion, as I will not stop with the 100th observation (maybe then it turns to "hundreds").











1. om cu scaun la cap


(“om cu scaun la cap” = “one with a chair on their head”/ meaning a wise and calculated person)
Small wooden chair, carried at all times, ready to photograph people with it on top of their head, to create a moment of appreciation for their wisdom/wittyness.











2. the weight of the world, the weight of imagination


🔵 🟢

I wanted in some form to carry the weight of the world on my shoulder, so I got a blue dot tattooed. To balance it out, on my left shoulder there is a green dot, which is the planet of my imagination. One contains all the events of the world, one is in a continuous collection of spaces, landscapes and objects I have seen or imagined.











3. temporar pitoresc


.   

(“temporar pitoresc” = ”temporarily picturesque”)
While the Universității Street in Cluj-Napoca was being refurbished (summer 2023), my favourite cafe and its sidewalk terrace became similar to a village “birt” (=pub). Chairs sitting on wobbly rocks, passerby becoming even more interesting to look at. It was temporarily picturesque*. I spray painted the words on the rocks that were to be covered by the new pavements.

*Only while making this artwork did I realise I was misusing the Romanian word for picturesque, wrongly thinking it meant beautifully rural/pastoral/archaic. Figured out my error by the similarity in the two languages of the word (pitoresc / picturesque). I think it still worked as an expression.











4. heavy words




Crooked vinyl-cut exhibition text removed with a heat gun, making letters crumble and contract into heavy flakes. Picked up and placed in a container for safekeeping.












5. me as a supporting column




Flexing my caryatid muscles 🏛️ at @hetnieweinstituut and @colognedesignmusem.











6. 1:1 rugs, sand and wood editions

      

Simple gestures made outdoors in order to make a temporary surface for hosting / gathering / introversion.












7. spatial relations : coloana infinitului


I love you Brâncuși.
print available for sale.

spatial relations : Icelandic rocks









8. 21st century fly


 

buzzing reflection, seen often in public transport and interior spaces with good lighting. see if you spot it on a sunny day.🪰📱👍











9. me reading a book about colour


(The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair)












10. self discentered



My phones’ front camera stopped working, showing colourful streaks of colour. I developed a mechanism to continue taking pictures with the selfie camera, flipping the phone towards the subject of interest, making inanimate objects take crooked selfies. When the process was too frustrating, I took a “normal” picture, challenging myself to remember what was supposed to be in the photograph instead of the glitched colours.











11. great juxtaposition with Sam Jacob




While taking about reality and representation during a lecture for the European Architecture Students Assembly (2022), Sam Jacob showed an installation he made of a neon basket hoop. It just so happened the wall we were projecting his lecture on was underneath a real basket hoop, which made for a great contrast between what is real and what is represented.







12. a collective future performance




Batch of business cards, marked with a diagonal line drawn on their collective spines. If all the people I've ever handed a business card would decide to coordinate, they could reconstruct the line.
Good luck.











weekly more are being added from the archive ;)