Tote bag
Hakon Bendiksen shores up, shims and relevels the houses of Longyearbyen, raised on piles driven into ground that freezes and thaws; this arctic tern tote bag carries his portrait, from Animal Kinhood, my series of animals with clothes and a trade.
Foto: Peter Pearsall / USFWS (dominio público)Sterna paradisaea
In August the wood moves more.
Breeds on Arctic and subarctic coasts, islets and coastal tundra — Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, northern Scandinavia and Russia, the British Isles, the Canadian Arctic and Alaska — on shingle beaches and predator-free islets. Winters in the Southern Ocean, tied to the sea ice and to the most productive waters of the southern hemisphere.
Three thicknesses. The bucket sits by the door of his room, with the wooden shims sorted by thickness, and out of it comes whichever one is needed when a house starts to go over on one side. The plastic ones he keeps apart. He doesn't like them, and if you ask him why he can't answer: he stops for a second to think about it and starts talking about something else. The wooden ones he cuts himself.
He cut the first one at fourteen, out of a piece of formwork board lying on the warehouse floor. The tip came out too thick and it was good for nothing, not then and not later. He has carried it ever since in the inside pocket of his jacket, where nobody sees it. He has changed jackets three times and the shim has moved from one to the next every time, without him making anything of it. The tip is still just as thick as the day he cut it.
