Earth Terminal

From Cuenca to Quito, September 23, 2018

A plane flies over the ploughed furrows of the Andes. The pilot in a calm voice announces turbulence. The plane frolics like a dog’s tail. From left to right in the speckled sky. From bottom to top like a playful snout.

Everything drops suddenly except the brain and the heart. One stays suspended in the heights. The eyes roll in their sockets, no longer find the way back to the body. Passengers do the wave, screaming with fear.

And again the tail. And again the snout.

My forehead streams like a pole, but where to look to restore the trim? The plane tips, earth and sky replace each other. The Andes charge the flank of the plane: it’s that we’re turning, we capsize in the relief. Above all, don’t vomit. Screw your gaze into the neck of the cockpit.

Suddenly we go down, or it’s the ground that rises; we go back up, and it’s the ground that goes down. As if the plane were climbing in order to land, exposing its belly to the cliffs to hoist itself onto the plateau of the runways. But no, it was a cancelled landing. Already we’re gaining altitude again. The pilot crackles in the loudspeaker. We must be patient a short quarter of an hour, glide above the runways like an eagle. The turbulence is too strong. Panicked voices bounce off the portholes. We are nothing but sweat and whiteness, heart and brain squashed against the plastic ceiling. We plunge into a crevasse. We’re going to crash. At the last minute someone pulls the asphalt carpet, slips the runway under the plane’s wheels. Left-right, left-right the tail; north-south, north-south the snout. The padded paws bounce on the ground. At last the world finds its right side again. The passengers bark with relief. The cabin explodes in applause.

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