Tote bag
For the market, for shopping, for everyday life, a bag with a calm-eyed black caiman up front. This is Yara's black caiman tote bag, with a portrait I created for my Animal Kinhood series.
Melanosuchus niger
The silence before the pulse is what matters.
The entire Amazon basin (Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, French Guiana), the Orinoco basin and the Pantanal wetlands. It inhabits slow waters, lakes, várzea (seasonal floodplain), and both blackwater and whitewater.
This cloth bag is built for the hustle: the market run, fruit, bread, cables, whatever comes up. Sling it over your shoulder, fill it, empty it, and do it all again the next day. In the portrait you only see the friendly face, a broad-jawed black caiman who looks like she's seen it all. Everything else — where she comes from, how it started — doesn't fit on a piece of cloth; I tell that part in her story.
Her craft was born out of loss, with no glamour attached. When her father died and she was fourteen, Yara, the eldest of three, dropped the ballet she'd been doing and started taking on odd jobs around the neighborhood: among them, fixing headphone cables with electrical tape for the local kids. Years later, those loose cables led to one of the best sound engineers on the river. It fits a tote perfectly: an unpretentious object, the kind built for daily use, carrying a caiman who started out repairing what everyone else had written off. If you like how it works, there are more Animal Kinhood bags with other characters.
