"Detours" is an artist book created in 2018 during a year stay in Marseille, France. 

Scratched bend aluminium cover, sticky oil on paper painting followed by prints of distorted photos of wrecked cars and fast performative drawings on paper. The pages are lose - there is no binding.

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Julia Emslander’s drawings emerge from fast, physical gestures—raw, immediate, and powerful. Using ink, charcoal, graphite, and pastels, they oscillate between drawing and action: traces of a performative moment inscribed in line.

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Developed during a year in Marseille, this practice grew out of urban exploration and physical mark-making. Inspired by Guy Debord’s ideas of détour and dérive, the works respond directly to the city’s destroyed, weathered, and vibrant surfaces. Each drawing becomes a resonant body of urban materialities—a translation of fragment, rhythm, and resistance.

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Situated within the wider field of performance and music, the drawings act as visual protocols of embodied perception. Like improvisation, they are driven by tempo, impulse, and repetition. They function both as autonomous compositions and as source material for Emslander’s interdisciplinary practice.