Andriko Lozowy

Table of Con­tents | Arti­cle doi: 10.17742/IMAGE.SA.12.1.9 | PDF

Struc­tures of Antic­i­pa­tion exper­i­ment­ed with method­olog­i­cal and tem­po­ral con­straints. It also cou­pled geo­graph­i­cal and cul­tur­al speci­fici­ty to cre­ate an ethos of the con­cept of ter­roir. In this brief essay, I will stretch ter­roir beyond the par­tic­u­lar­i­ty of culi­nary appli­ca­tions to include social-spa­tial-geo­graph­i­cal fla­vors that nour­ish a loca­tion-based cultural-psycho-geography.

Ter­roir is a term that refers to how cer­tain places pro­duce cer­tain iden­ti­fi­able qual­i­ties in wine and agri­cul­tur­al pro­duce, to the cli­mate that makes par­tic­u­lar types of this pro­duce pros­per there and nour­ish its human and oth­er inhab­i­tants and give it a dis­tinc­tive taste or flavour based on the nat­ur­al con­di­tions of soil and topog­ra­phy (Bar­ber, 2006). (Cit­ed in Hur­ren and Has­be-Ludt 2011, 18. Jour­nal of Cur­ricu­lum The­o­riz­ing. Vol­ume 27, Num­ber 2, 2011).

Before I arrived in Wind­sor, I want­ed to inves­ti­gate the com­plex­i­ties of pow­er, colo­nial­ism, and place. How­ev­er, once the hour­glass began to count down, and time became finite and scarce, I sim­ply max­i­mized oppor­tu­ni­ties that exist­ed at hand. The out­come was five images that com­pressed every extra­ne­ous arti­fact, sense, and affect to sim­ple ges­tur­al draw­ings. The group’s sup­port let me exceed expec­ta­tions and dis­cov­er an urgency in the unexpected.

To describe the out­put as mag­ic is too holis­tic. Per­haps the more appro­pri­ate word is design.

Ger­man-born Cana­di­an graph­ic design­er Rolf Hard­er says, “to pro­duce good design you must aban­don every­thing that is not sup­port­ing the mes­sage” (from the film, Design Cana­da, 2018, Greg Dur­rell). I’m struck by the idea that, as the sand passed through the hourglass’s neck, the Struc­tures of Antic­i­pa­tion col­lec­tive pro­duced works of immense clarity.

Artis­tic pro­duc­tion is gru­elling. It induces pan­ic. It is exhaust­ing. Yet cre­ative flow emerged from the stress. I imag­ine that the aban­don­ment of expec­ta­tions and the embrace of the sen­so­r­i­al gave me pres­ence with ter­roir. The place­ness of the place and affec­tive ener­gy in a moment let me con­nect to his­to­ry, peo­ple, and mem­o­ry. The image is almost sac­ri­fi­cial. In the still­ness of the moment, ener­gy became still. There was a heav­i­ness of a qui­et anticipation.

All the while, the ground where I found place shakes as trains trun­dle between Wind­sor and Detroit.

Flow is some­thing I dis­cuss with my under­grad­u­ate stu­dents. It has the pow­er to guide peo­ple to a place that seems mys­te­ri­ous, per­haps even unknown. But my own expe­ri­ence, a his­to­ry laid out across a lin­ear stretch of time, reminds me that, the flow is only accessed when I press into the unchart­ed, uncom­fort­able, and unknown.

Struc­tures of Antic­i­pa­tion is where I accessed the flow. I con­nect­ed with it. I felt it. The expe­ri­ence remind­ed me that my own pho­to­graph­ic and walk­ing method of research depend on an enforced pres­sure. I learned that I must find the time for flow. And Wind­sor is where I merged with place.