Framed poster
It arrives framed and ready for the wall: this framed aye-aye print brings you Stan, a portrait from my Animal Kinhood series, the one I sign as Yago Partal, where the animals dress and live like people. Enormous amber eyes, big dark ears either side of a black beanie with a white skull the size of a fingernail, and under that, the leather jacket with spiked studs on the shoulders.
Foto: Rafael Peier (@rafaelpeier) / Unsplash (Unsplash License)Daubentonia madagascariensis
Put it under Solofo's name, I was slow today.
Lowland tropical rainforest along the east coast of Madagascar and dry deciduous forest in the west and northwest, in a distribution fragmented into pockets: Masoala, Nosy Mangabe, Mananara Nord —where Aye-Aye Island, or Île Roger, works as a semi-wild sanctuary—, Daraina in the far north, and populations further south such as Ranomafana. It is endemic to Madagascar and lives nowhere else.
Nobody in the crew argues about who clears his row first. What does not add up is the paperwork: the good rows go down under the name of Solofo, his cousin, who works slower and who can read that notebook perfectly well. Solofo has never said a word. Stan explains it with his chin a little raised, listing whose name he signs things under and whose he does not, and treats the matter as closed before anyone can ask a second time.
The version he gives outside is half true, and the other half he has never said out loud: if his name goes at the very top, somebody in the office is going to want to put a face to it. He has known how that works since he was fifteen, the afternoon a buyer came to the warehouse and they sent him to the back until the man left. He settled it at seventeen with a pencil and has never revisited it. In the season now running he is still crossing out.
