Kabul s Weavers Words Cyril Zammit Photographs Jalal Abuthina The first thing I saw of Kabul was its mountain ranges. We were flying in summer and from the aeroplane window you could see them stretching for miles, rocky and bare. When we landed, I spotted three white barrage balloons floating in the sky and took some photographs, wondering what they were for. We later learned that they were unmanned surveillance cameras. I had been invited to Kabul by the Fatima bint Mohammed Initiative (FBMI), a carpet-weaving project led by Sheikha Fatima bint Mohammed bin Zayed, daughter of the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. It seeks to empower women through the use of traditional skills that have been passed down through generations, and has employed more than 3,000 Afghans, 70 per cent of whom are female. Nada Debs, a Lebanese interior designer, came with me to create a collection of contemporary carpets for the FBMI. We didn t choose to travel to Kabul lightly. In the West, all we hear about Afghanistan is its conflicts and tragedies; you could be forgiven for thinking that people are locked up in their houses all day. This trip revealed to me that life continues in spite of the violence we are so accustomed to seeing on the news. In the capital, the streets are busy with people weaving through traffic, running errands and selling hand-crafted goods or mountains of almonds and apricots. People go to work and children get dropped off at school; they even have lycées français, as I was surprised, and happy, to see. It is a chaotic city to move around in but, at least during my trip, driving through Kabul felt similar to navigating Beijing at rush hour. On entering the production site, the first thing you hear is music. Women, sitting in rows of four or five, weave in time to Afghan pop playing through Bluetooth speakers and chat while they thread blues and pinks in repetitive motions through wooden grids twice their height. The other room is quieter: women wearing protective masks crouch around large clouds of wool, using their hands to transform it into yarn. The materials all come from within Afghanistan. Colours are extracted from plants such as khatmi flowers, which are harvested throughout the country, and the hand-spun cotton used to make the base of the carpets originates from northern regions such as Takhar and Herat. The production process is wellstructured and organised: women do most of the threading and weaving, and men cut, shave and wash the carpets, which can take up to six people. The only mechanical stage is when they pile the rug into a colossal tumble-dryer, about 3m in diameter. There are no restricted areas for men or women on the production site. Everyone eats lunch together in a large communal dining space, and they all work in groups, apart from the man who makes the dyes. He has a secret recipe that he will not even reveal to the FBMI, so he works alone in a locked laboratory. Nada s designs are more complex than those the women are used to weaving. Sections of traditional pattern merge with blocks of gradient colour, with different shapes and pile height for each piece. The weavers were cautious at first, but happy to work on something unconventional. Through the collaboration, the FBMI hopes to show how traditional Afghan craft can appeal to a contemporary audience. The crafts industry, like all others in the country, has been under threat since the majority of Western troops left in 2014, taking a potential market of more than 50,000 customers with them. Chicken Street in Kabul, for instance, is full of little shops selling antique memorabilia, hand-crafted 24 jewellery and precious gems. Walking through the market and talking to the shop owners, we learned that Afghanistan is the world s largest producer of semiprecious lapis lazuli stones. They told us it had been a year and a half since they had seen tourists. There is scope for the nation to export more of its produce, and make use of its skills and resources, once the trade economy stabilises. In the southwest region, they are transforming poppy fields into saffron, one of the world s most expensive spices. Slowly, wartime exchange is giving way to healthier, longer term sources of income. I would like to return to Kabul. Its people are working towards new challenges and there seems to be a huge amount of hope. Design and craft can help to generate that; they show people that there is more they can do with the resources and traditions of their country. It is time to look beyond the danger in Kabul the barrage balloons and fear of violence and to start seeing the potential in Afghanistan. Photoessay
A weaver carding the wool, a process by which dirt is removed from the fibres (left). Meanwhile, a member of FBMI security sits amongst the bags of wool stored on the production site (above). Previous page: Rush-hour traffic leaving downtown Kabul at the end of the working day. 26 Photoessay
Photographs and a carpet map are spread across the office desk, the latter of which is used by the weavers to trace the carpet they are working on (left). 28
A group of three men clip the Square rug, one of the designs created by Nada Debs for FBMI s You & I collection (above). Right: Banu Bint Mohamed Hassan, a weaver who is part of FBMI. Next page: Men wash shampoo out of a carpet on the roof of a building overlooking the mountains surrounding Kabul. 30 Photoessay
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