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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Swiss Dreaming Among Mist and Soaked Tents

a collection of unstructured thoughts and images from easa tourist, the 2019 summer european architecture students assembly





We are among air. We populate space. We are in between slices of clouds, striving for understanding. Some to understand EASA*, some a topic; all searching for ourselves. I wake up from a dream and gulped two Ovomaltine biscuits. So have they, and so have I become one with the ants that inhabit the tent with us. I woke up from a dream that included functional screens and realistic, stoic men sitting at a round table. The somber discussion came to profound and concrete answers, but when I was asked to conclude the spoken ideas, it was too hard to grasp again. I was waking up, and the idea was gone. Dreams are loosely remembered, and potential future recollections of them are frustrating to try and grasp, just as daydreaming is. EASA for me is being even closer to the verge of understanding what these amorphous strivings for the future might be; that is what a short escape in an utopian community can do to you.






Awoken from the dream, I take my earplugs out and hear the roar of the rain at full volume, even magnified by the way it hits our cover. I sit and wait to survive through this right of passage collectively with the other inhabitants of this circus tent, in order to become welcomed in the land defined by height, terrain and clouds. We are in a tent of 300 msq where you question how many dreams are had, and wonder what the colour yellow looks like in the outside world. While the rain pours and torns, you ponder that this is the show we came for: our living together as both performers and audience. It even brings it to a point where people watching is entertaining, more than acceptable, maybe even encouraged. The entire surface is the stage and the play has many parallel acts:

- a girl examining her shoes’ sole,

- another one flickering her fingers above her head while laying in her sleeping bag;

- Bruno bending under a line of hanging clothes that obstructed his pathway.

- Building Barbegazi Building Barbegazi

- a table being rushed over for tall boys to sit on top of it and push a belly of water in order to avoid the tents’ rupture;

- ideas and names of podcasts being exchanged

- pages being flicked and kindles being swiped

- food being consumed collectively or independently from a secret stash

- alarms being left on to create an omnipresent soundtrack.





We drank campari under naked architecture while listening to Elvis.

Afterwards we arrived to Grand Salle for the lecture. The chairs were aligned, but not covering a third of the surface of the room. We started shyly, but ended up dragging rows all at once closer to the stage. It was like a brief performance in which the lines of chairs were racing to the front, curious/hungry for architecture. And maybe these chairs, for a brief moment, enacted what the possessors of the bottoms that sat upon them are. They are beings hungry for architecture.

Breathing, social, creatures that create and inhabit temporary places. People carrying architecture on shoulders and in thought; making use of carried objects in order to section through the landscape. Are we looking at us, or the rock? Are our memories proof enough of our movement?





We all felt Hanibal on our backs, or hanging from our hands, for a while with no release from this promise we made. That was the day with the strong enough idea to build an EASA around it. This was the scaling unit after which all architecture was divided and sized. This was the day that is now easier to remember than it was to live? Did this day last an instant, or was it dilated in time?



We occupied a space and made a millipede to accommodate our temporary existence. Its plethora of openings were good for mother nature’s gifts to seep into the belly of our home. Light, but also all the wet elements she could gift us. We held onto stitches to keep her gift from coming inside, but she made it in anyway.





We all leave with whatever we had to take from the experience, and with new answers to questions we didn’t even know we were asking. Now I am home. I put my earbuds back in and search for pure emotion in my EASA dream.


*EASA (European Architecture Students Assembly) is a platform for cultural and educational exchange, connecting architecture students and professionals from all European countries. EASA does not exist as a legitimate international body and has no chairman or any type of directors, but instead is built up of equal representatives spread throughout the whole continent. The assembly is organized by students for students and so provides a unique platform for education where the cultural experience is life-changing. EASA gives a chance to experience architecture in a way that universities are yet unable to provide — it brings students to a certain context, defined by the location and theme of the assembly, where they have to raise architectural questions themselves and investigate them through the eyes of all European cultures simultaneously. Being their own educators, students then elaborate the answers and bring them to reality.

**all images are from personal collection, made on film clumsily exposed to light