Framed poster
It arrives already framed, with a hanger: a black caiman facing forward, in her cream jacket with two gold hoops on her jaw, against a teal background. This is Yara's framed black caiman poster, 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 framed black caiman print arrives already mounted, with its frame and hanger, so all you do is drive in a nail. Inside it is the same broad-jawed black caiman, cream jacket over a white sweater, with thin gold as the only warm flash of color. I created her facing forward, against a clean background: it reads at a glance from across the hallway. Hang it somewhere people walk past; the portrait doesn't ask for any company beyond the wall.
When her grandmother, Dona Mercedes, died in Tefé, the boat took thirty-six hours upriver. Yara put into her own ear the thin gold hoop her grandmother had worn her whole life, and from the house she took a cardboard box with fourteen moldy cassettes: voices of women from the river singing boi-bumbá that no one had kept. The box weighed almost nothing and carried half a lifetime of people inside it. That gold and that box explain Yara better than any sentence could; her whole story is on the character page, and behind all of it, me, Yago Partal, with a family of creatures you can see in the rest of the collection.
