Earth Terminal

Ban Pha Mu, December 17, 2019

Like a bulldozer launched across the landscape, a smooth ravage of steamroller, the road unrolls its new black asphalt, stretches its freshly painted lines.

On the black 150 cc scooter, I ride over the disaster in the joy of the leaning curves. Sections of hills have been cut away, slices of cake trimmed with a spoon. But the cake is hard and the spoon, dynamite. The rock had to be broken against the grain of its stratum, in the violence of nitroglycerine.

The ravaged edges of the hills are wounds that ought to be dressed. They are not dressed: they are petrified by a new violence. To parry the vengeance of the hills, their falls of rocks, the cliffs have been given a stepped form – with very high steps: a giant’s staircase –, and all of it has been poured in bitumen. So that riding on this stretch of road, one advances under high tiered walls, grey and cold, in the built landscape.

Ban Pha Mu: the village of the pig cliff. I decide to play tourist by going to visit, barely a mile from the backwater, Pha Nang Khoi: the cave of the waiting lady. One expects nothing of it except a little coolness, perhaps, on this leaden afternoon. I climb a few steps, I follow a path in the forest, at last I discover the mouth of the cave. As I go deeper in, the birds, the leaves, the wind, all the little noises of the forest fall mute. It is in the rock that true silence resides. There is no one else in the lair – it’s an ordinary place, one cave among so many in this gruyère country: few people come to Pha Nang Khoi. I hear only the sound of my own steps. When I stop walking, a few drops of water resound, which would have been inaudible in the forest. Greenish lights illuminate the various architectures, now straight and broken, now flowing, magmatic.

How peaceful it is, how cold inside the stone. If one could live there... but it’s a tomb. Death is calm, which sometimes calls. I turn my heels on it. The light and the forest burst forth. I come back to the agitation, to the noise, to life.

Life all the same. Life at the crust.

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