Earth Terminal

Approaching Mandalay, January 22, 2019

On the dike raised against the Irrawaddy river the Myo Pratt road takes the city from behind. On the left hand are barges and trawlers; on the right marshes and basins. I ride my motorbike on the bulldozed crest, in this world of iron and dust.

All at once everything tumbles in, everything crowds and piles up. Buildings of plastic jerricans, pyramids of watermelons. Restaurants with nylon banners, chairs at the roadside, under the stride of the raging trucks. Cows in the mud, their troughs – then right away a dump, soiled shreds. Dirty children rummaging in the bins, laundry drying in the middle of the median. A cargo tuk-tuk, the bed full of bloody fish. Minibuses, trucks running on natural gas, cylinders upright behind the seats. A little horse pulling a cabriolet, and the man inside holding the reins. A styrofoam dish thrown out the window of an SUV. Life on top of it all, among the machines, on the jetty of earth. The days spent, the children their games, the barrels of diesel. The heat of the engines that makes the atmosphere undulate.

All of it that falls and breaks the line of the road, the sentence struggles to render, the sentence struggles to render…

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