The one who exists.

Everything hurt. My back hurt, other things hurt, things hurt without my being able to say quite where. I no longer knew who I was. I no longer knew what I liked. I no longer even knew whether I wanted to turn left or right.

I had just had a child. I had just left a relationship that had been fairly violent. And there I was in that bed, in a body I didn't recognise, with a life I didn't recognise either.

Before that, I took an unusual path. I travelled a great deal. I worked for embassies and for NGOs. I lived in places most people will never see.

And yet I never felt I belonged in Switzerland. I never managed to find the place where I felt right. For a long time I thought it was a question of where I lived. It wasn't. It was a question of knowing what I loved doing.

I spent more than fifteen years in film production and advertising. I have always had a very personal relationship with images. I come from an artistic background too.

I was a photographer for the Swiss embassy and for NGOs, in Senegal and in India. That was where I truly felt alive — behind my camera. I never noticed the time passing.

I never studied photography. My camera was simply how I expressed myself. With every photograph, I felt I existed. Through images, I dared to say what I couldn't put into words.

I decided to leave for Morocco. Not to run away: to find myself somewhere nobody expected anything of me.

And there, several people began calling me Kaina. I hadn't chosen it. It was given to me.

Kaina means the one who exists.

Kaina is the project that ties together everything I have done. The fieldwork, the NGOs, the photography, the collapse, the rebuilding.

It is everything I want to bring — through my path, my skills, and what I have lived through — to the women who need it.