Earth Terminal

From Bangkok to Hua Hin, December 29, 2018

In the dining car of a Second World War train, burgundy carriages with mustard stripes, the loudspeakers disgorge an old Thai rock. Frenetic rhythm, electric guitar, comic lyrics for village fêtes. Music for a road trip by pickup on the roads of Siam.

Windows open the car bounds on the old rails, grinds out its life in the switches, wriggles under the interchanges. Filaments of shantytown cling to the edges, on the public lands of the State Railway. There are tuk-tuks and chicken coops. Shirtless men siphoning bottles of Chang. A cult statue garlanded with flowers. Women showering with a scoop, hair stuck to the face, body wrapped in a sarong.

The canned music is blind to what surrounds it. It goes on shouting its joy with its nasal voice and its wedding chords. In the curve a kid from the shantytown displays his willy at the windows of the train, jerks off with his gob split to the ears. Behind him a chorus explodes with laughter. The dining-car lady saw nothing, talking to someone on the phone, grumpy air. iPhone cord held between her lips, she bites into it like a bulldog to keep the mic hanging near her mouth. She bawls futilities over the music.

The train stops in the little stations with bounding names, Bang Bamru, Salaya, Nakhonpathom. On the platforms the stationmasters, grey suit and badged cap, ring the big bell to signal arrivals and departures. In the car a conductor in an identical suit, stars on the epaulettes, sits down at a table and smokes cigarettes – and the vintage smoke fills the car. The restaurant waiters wear outmoded orange suits. They have no beer to serve us: the junta has banned the sale of alcohol on trains, and nobody likes it, not the waiters, not me, not the music that knows only the party.

At another table teenagers take their seats. They wear little moustaches and miguels, studiously swallow their mama – spicy soup in a paper cup, pork or tom yam flavour.

I note what passes and goes – colours, faces, hair, suits and chords –, as if the world came down to this car rolling to the rhythm of an old Thai rock…

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