Earth Terminal

From Balige to Berastagi, July 14, 2019

On two wheels on the lines of risk, the road is hard and beauty lodges there. In a bend a bus surges, overtakes the slow line of cars, drives head-on against the traffic, straight toward the face-off. To my honks and the flashing of my headlights, it answers by the mouth of its cannons. Unequal game of chicken, it won’t give way: I’m forced to leap onto the shoulder to avoid death.

Law of the jungle. The jungle is beautiful, rising: on both sides of the road, stands of pines, great crunchy palms, profusions of greens. The rain falls heavily to water the giant plants.

The road is dirty and dust. The machines crush us. It’s Sunday and along the road walk the well-dressed, the ironed shirts, the neat little dresses. The bells ring, the little churches fill, the doors close again – and the dust stays outside.

The tanker trucks negotiate the hairpins with a hoarse slowness. They have frightening cries, synthetic howls: a low note, then a note lower still. One thinks of the cry of the flying saucers in Close Encounters of the Third Kind – but these trucks are terrestrial, terrestrial, terrestrial.

Approaching Berastagi, under the clouds or the fumes that fall back from the Sibayak volcano, amid the howling traffic, there are a few clumps of flower sellers. The bouquets of clean colours, the hatchings of fresh petals explode amid the grimy workshops.

And beauty in the violence of the trucks, in the black smoke of the diesels. And beauty in the buses that charge, in the dust and the horns, in the wrinkles of the beaten earth. And beauty, and beauty, beauty in the ordinary of the brown road…

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