Lakatoi

A lakatoi, the woven sailing canoe of the Motu people of Papua New Guinea, rises as a golden crescent against a sky tiled with butterflies. The real thing carried Motu traders hundreds of miles on the annual Hiri voyages, its crab-claw sails bellying out as it went to barter clay pots for sago, and that same pull of Oceanic art once electrified Gauguin and the German Expressionists. Two details seal the meaning: the standing guardian wears a tunic of bird-skulls, and the sky is full of butterflies, which matters because in Greek a single word, psyche, means both "butterfly" and "soul." Wiedijk lifts a working trade canoe out of the Pacific and remakes it as a moon full of souls, so that an act of commerce becomes a passage between worlds.