A sneak preview into new season of Freej - by way of an Afghan carpet

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The Freej team is heading a social project featuring a carpet made by Afghan women that reproduces a mural from the 2016 season of the cartoon series.

Spoiler alert: fans of the Emirati cartoon phenomenon Freej should avoid the Yas Mall showroom of the Fatima bint Mohammed Initiative if they'd rather not have a sneak preview of the 2016 season.

A shop dedicated to the handicrafts of Afghanistan might seem an odd place for Comic Con-like revelations, but thanks to a collaboration between FBMI, a social enterprise dedicated to improving the lives of Afghan women, and Freej creator and producer Mohammed Saeed Harib, a piece of artwork from the show has been reproduced, by hand, in the finest Ghazni wool.

"It's a mural that will appear in one of the major scenes that you'll see in the next season, a kind of poem that explains what's really going on in the episode" says Harib, the 37-year-old animator behind Freej. "The TV audience won't see it until next Ramadan, and it will only appear on screen for six seconds, but it probably took a month to think about it, design it, sketch it out and colour it."

Like many of the details that help to give Freej its sense of reality and depth, the artwork was developed by the animation team at the Dubai-based Lammtara Studios during what Harib describes as the pre-production phase of the show.

"This is a studio that is generating art, even if it does end up in a cartoon but many people don't realise that everything you see in the show might be an art piece, or just how much attention goes into them. When we design what we call reference material for the thinking behind Freej, we spend two years in pre-production so the show can come together at the right time," he says.

“One of the things we have to go through is a whole thought process, even if it is for an artwork that will appear for only six seconds, but it’s only when you see the artwork outside the show that you realise how much work that process involves.”

Measuring four metres by 80 centimetres, the carpet took 360 hours to make, and was produced by six weavers working on a single loom.

As Harib explains, it uses traditional Afghan carpet-weaving skills and techniques to tell a familiar Emirati tale, “but I think it’s the first time that we have shown local culture in a way that is so contemporary”, he says.

Both the mural and the carpet are a modern take on a long-standing local tradition in which wealthier women rent out their jewellery to women who cannot afford their own and, in doing so, avoid having to pay zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam.

They depict a generous mother figure, guarded by sentinels, who is showering a crowd of women with gold.

Those in the lower rows are carrying olive branches, a traditional sign of peace and friendship, which turn into knives as they near the mother figure.

“What we’re trying to say in the episode is that when money comes into friendship, it is a very dangerous thing, and people are not what they seem,” the animator explains. “The women who come as friends will later stab her in the back and leave her with nothing by saying the jewellery belongs to them.”

The carpet is the first commission from FBMI’s latest Artists for Change initiative, a programme in which five Emirati designers collaborate with FBMI to create carpets that blur the boundaries between craft, design and highly collectable contemporary art.

"The ladies of our cartoon show, of Freej, are collaborating with the ladies of Afghanistan to do something different. We have a certain creativity here in Dubai and there is a certain creativity to what the women do in Afghanistan, and I think these two coming together is an amazing achievement," says Harib.

The other artists in FBMI’s Artists for Change programme include jewellery designers Shamsa Al Abbar and Salama Khalfan, as well as members of two UAE royal families, Sheikha Wafa Hasher Al Maktoum, artist and owner of FN Designs, and Sheikha Mariam Khalifa Al Nahyan, founder of MKS Jewellery.

“This is the first year of a complete programme for bridging the gap between artisans in Afghanistan and artists in the UAE and we were looking for talented, well-­established artists who were engaged in different fields,” explains FBMI’s Maywand Jabarkhyl.

“We’ll weave their designs into handmade carpets and the proceeds from their sale or auction will go directly to the women who made the carpets in Afghanistan.”

• The carpet is on display at the FBMI showroom at Yas Mall. Visit www.fbmi.ae for more details

nleech@thenational.ae