Earth Terminal

From Hakha to Gangaw, January 18, 2019

On the way out of Hakha the smell of petroleum goes to my head. The gasoline shacks follow one another along the curve; the plastic jerricans are made of the same oil.

The spout of a funnel burrows into the tank of my motorbike. A woman pours into it the contents of three tin jugs. The needle of the gauge quivers north of full, and full throttle I tear myself away from the town.

On the road I pass a scooter flanked by big wicker baskets. And suddenly… the animal cry! It grunts! There are live pigs in the woven cages. They’re being carried to the butchers of the capital.

Further on I’m slowed by a big truck marked DIESEL. It carries metal barrels in the colours of containers. 45-gallon drums used to supply the tanks of Hakha – they’re empty now, you can see them bouncing and knocking together in the bed.

It’s morning, the road is fine, the asphalt is good. All joyful I overtake the trucks, I negotiate the hairpins, in a hurry to cross the layers of cold air and go warm myself under the rind of the clouds. But in a shady bend I’m not on my guard: black and greasy bitumen: I’m going fast, I lean, and the wheel skids. The rear wheel. I feel it going, sliding on the slick of oil as on a living leather. In the stretched instant fear has no place: I’m ready, I will fall: but I stretch out my leg, the sole beats the asphalt – and surprise, everything comes back up like a cry: the motorbike pitches three times, rights itself: it rolls, it holds: I will keep my skin, until.

How barely things hold, one upon the other.

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