Ayana.

When Bibata started talking, Ayana knew she had to record without interrupting. Bibata was seventy at the time — she's seventy-eight today — and was a midwife from one of the communities of Kouré, sixty kilometers southeast of Niamey. She didn't speak French. She spoke Zarma and Fulfulde. Ayana interviewed her in Zarma, her own mother tongue, and what came out was the first complete account of how the giraffes came back to Kouré told from the perspective of the community's women. Not the biologists' version. Not the NGOs'. The grandmothers who saw the giraffes return to the well.

Bibata told the story of the drought, the hunting, the agreement between the community and the conservationists, the first calves born under community protection. She described how a young giraffe drank from the community well for the first time in years, and what that meant for the women who carried water every morning. When Ayana presented that recording at a conference in Ouagadougou, the audience went silent. Not out of politeness. It was the voice of someone who had witnessed something that almost no one documented at the time.

Twelve years of project. One hundred and eighty hours of testimonies. And Bibata's recording is still the piece that changes the expression of whoever hears it.

Ayana wears red by choice. She bought the coat in Ouagadougou at the FESPACO, the pan-African film festival. The scarf was a gift from Fatima, a weaver from the Yantala neighborhood in Niamey, who she sees on Saturdays at the Katako market. The earrings come from her grandmother Haoua, from Agadez. Deliberate monochrome. A strong aesthetic sense in someone who, on the other hand, lives in an almost empty apartment with a wardrobe full of bazin and wax fabrics she buys without needing them and touches when she needs to think.

The t-shirt has something of that: a garment that says something without explaining it. The red of Ayana's coat dominates the image and gives it a presence that needs no accessories. On the street it works without context. Whoever knows Animal Kinhood recognizes the portrait. Whoever doesn't sees a garment with a striking image of someone with a serious, direct gaze, and moves on. It doesn't ask for explanation.