Earth Terminal

Quito, September 3, 2018

In the dead of night a plane parachutes me into the middle of the mountains, into the gathers of the Andean gown, and my heels click on the waxed parquet: airport of steel and glass, hall of mirrors on an arid relief.

A bus carries me off toward the city, glides on the ribbon of the new road – marble on the walls of a basin –, along the dynamited slopes, concreted, a greenish grey and very smooth. Highway won from the improbable, earths and stones set in mortar, plants and worms smothered: latex pulled over the mouth of the world. One has asphyxiated the teeming surface of the earth, the brittle crust of geological time, our habitat, our crème brûlée present – and beneath, in the molten rock, the chthonic forces are splitting their gobs.

A taxi draws its flavescent lightning, sways along the deserted boulevards, frightens the stray dogs, narrowly misses a heap (shreds of vinyl?), climbs narrow ramps, negotiates passages, flies over the rooftops and uncovers a neighbourhood, dumps me in front of a shut façade, steel gate the colour of bronze. Grilled opening: a face comes to frame itself in it:

– ¡Buenas noches!

The latch creaks. I am exhausted. Sleep will have to be found.

The Project

Earth Terminal is a long-haul work by Mahigan Lepage. A planetary narrative written from inside a catastrophized era.

Level with the asphalts and the concretes, at the skin of the beaten earth, there is the living that clings to the earth’s crust; active dramas playing out in the instant. Multiplied by a hundred, by a thousand, these micro-narratives would form something like a world – a shifting mass where one could travel.

One advances through Earth Terminal by following the veins of concrete matter: skin, steel, rubber, diesel, hair... For there is no edge, no beyond. There is only the hard crust of experience that runs through places and bodies, times.

Notes on the project

Inventory in progress