Earth Terminal

From Phrae to Uttaradit, December 18, 2019

On the road that advances through the green landscape, across a so-called protected area (but there are almost no more tigers or wild elephants: the big mammals pale in these besieged islets), zone almost spared by the saws and the ploughshares (but not by the need to connect, to transport things, to move between the razed earths of Phrae and of Uttaradit), on the new grey-black asphalt, broken here and there by orangey slices (why these segments of bitumen the colour of fire?), in the descents and the curving climbs, between the lumbering trucks and the blind SUVs, at eighty an hour on the PCX 150, zigzagging on and between and in all of it, one feels animal one feels feline.

Today is a lean day, a day of voluntary fasting. I haven’t eaten since yesterday, and the afternoon advances. But hunger is a force for the tiger that hunts. It is a state that knows neither joy nor contentment. But it knows strength, ferocity.

I am one with the black scooter. I am mechanical body, swift machine. Running hunter, hunting runner, I hunger for the next curve, hunger for the next overtaking. Hunger for speed and downhill, for heat and wind. I am road beast, asphalt for element: the tiger after the forests. I plant my claws in the bitumen, my teeth in the curves. In the helmet I let out a very loud roar, risen from the empty belly and the rasping throat. I feel alive.

Arrived in Uttaradit, at the market in the centre of town, I break the fast by swallowing a freshly squeezed orange juice. The belly calms; evening will fall. I ride a little further toward Lap Lee, in the surrounding countryside. The sun is collapsing onto the fields: big Florida orange, blazing bitumen.

The earth swallows the day. Evening eats our hunger. And our roars.

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