Earth Terminal

Phnom Penh, January 5, 2020

In front of the Phnom Penh airport evening comes down on the boulevards, cuts out the angle of the buildings against the dog-eared sky. Women travel in fluorescent bubbles, neon interiors of chartered tuk-tuks. The headlights of the trucks and the cars dazzle better than suns.

The great white machine appears at the crossroads. Taller than the cars, the scooters, the trailers and the motorbikes; stronger than the little people of the road. It’s a tramway. It stops.

A boy in a cap pushes a step: no fewer than four rungs to climb into the cabin. Modern interior, quartets of seats, suspended televisions, panoramic glazing, air conditioner at full blast. It’s cold as in a fridge, as if the better to preserve us.

The horn sounds and everything lurches off. We glide above the boulevards, in the big steel beast. There is no one else in the tram but a Russo-Italian as surprised as I am. In this bubble of cold and grey comfort, behind the windows that turn the city into a spectacle, one feels separated from the world, one becomes observer, like the crew of the Nautilus or, better still, like the occupants of The Steam House.

The elephant trumpets: the young driver can’t stop honking to frighten off all this life that teems in front: the tricycles, the street dogs, the children zigzagging on the tracks. We cross a market, elephant in a china shop. The stalls so tight, so close to the tracks: we’ll knock them over, for sure – but no, we only graze them. The people know the elephant, know to within a hair where it will set down its feet.

We plunge into a bushy zone, a sort of urban jungle, then the tramway splits a shantytown. The storefronts open, the fourth wall falls. One has the impression of passing through the middle of kitchens and living rooms. Successions of lit interiors, beautiful as in a film. A large family is eating at the table. A shirtless man breathes the evening air. A young girl does her makeup before a mirror. Do they not know that in the great white elephant icy eyes are spying on them?

On the horizon the buildings rise. Soon we will enter downtown. Green and pink neons trace the lineaments of tired office towers.

And the sky, soiled with light, lowers its eyelid on the night that comes.

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