Earth Terminal

Guayaquil, September 15, 2018

Under an interchange – sky of concrete that rumbles – the merchants pack up their treasures, trinkets from China or ten-dollar jeans. The iron shutters fall like eyelids. The street vendors launch the word as if it were the thing:

– ¡Botellas de agua!

– ¡Cepillos de dientes!

– ¡Jugo de naranja!

– ¡Leche de coco!

Trash – paper, plastic, aluminum – whirls at the feet of the last passersby.

I walk in the quarter of the peluquerías. Blue-white-red helices. The hairdressers replace the bars. Chile street is a capillary fiesta. The crowds spill over onto the sidewalks. In the salons the chairs spin, the hair flies off. Enormous scissors fly through the bush. Clippers shave the temples. Straight razors scrape the dry skins. Oh the tawny hair of the equatorial heads! Greasy locks fly up to the ceiling like small flying mammals. The floor is an invasion of lemmings. It copulates and clings to the barbers’ ankles. It spreads out into the street. It flies off in soft twists that smell of shea and coconut.

Under the tropical wind of the hair dryers and the salon hoods, women’s eyelids dream of a supple and silky world.

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