Earth Terminal

Quito, September 4, 2018

My shoes wear down in the trenches of the streets, on the cobbles and the broken sidewalks, in the shade of colonial façades. Then my legs beat the climbs, stiff as goat hocks, in the stepped passages, between low walls of graffiti – heave, heave in the rare air that parches the lungs. The houses tip into the valley. The shadows drain into the gutters, rainwater after the storm. Foot by foot the city tears itself from the sole and lets itself be embraced.

Quito a fabric of ochre colours, sand yellow, Mediterranean pastel. Quilt of façades and roofs unrolled on the woman’s belly of the valley, hemmed at the fold of the hillsides, set with churches and cathedrals of stone. Blanket pulled up to the suture of the hemispheres, there where the world turns on its axis like a dervish, in this clock country that day and night share in equal parts.

At the top of the hill, in the middle of Itchimbía park, a majestic greenhouse, completely empty: the gaze runs right through it. On the other side, silhouettes quiver in the warped landscape. Far below, in the vat of the relief, the city rubs its matters together, grates the tires and the petroleum soles. The rubbers heat and crumble; the world heats and crumbles.

I take up walking again. I go back down into the valley.

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