Advent Calendar
À la Mère de Famille x Zeina Abirached
Charmed by the talented Zeina Abirached's multicultural work, we entrusted the artist with the design of our seventh Advent calendar for a festive and warm result, with oriental inspirations.
Once passed into Zeina Abirached's hands, the calendar becomes a standalone object that we invite you to handle to discover the story she wishes to tell: "First, there was the desire for movement, for rhythm... Two faces projected themselves onto the facade of the historic À la Mère de Famille shop, two smiles, two mischievous pairs of eyes, a beautiful mustache, a beauty mark... I wanted us to go around the facade, to explore it, following their gazes."
The artist's signature, the black and white, transports us directly into a festive and musical atmosphere. "The curls of their hair appeared to dress the roof, like musical motifs, we could almost imagine them spinning and spinning on themselves in a festive melody." And the use of shimmering colors, touch by touch on her drawing, invites us into the sparkling universe of Christmas. You have to follow the cat, on the side, which makes the link between the characters and whose purring evokes to Zeina "winter, the comfort of a fireside and the delicious delicacies to taste every day in December".
Zeina Abirached
Zeina Abirached, author and illustrator, was born in Beirut in 1981 in the heart of the Lebanese civil war.
She studied graphic design at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts then joined the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2004 to specialize in comics to tell and illustrate her daily life as a child of war. She mainly uses black and white which allows her to strip down her drawing and develop motifs that become her signature.
In 2002, her book Catharsis won the first prize of the Beirut Comics Festival. Zeina is also present in the official selection of the Angoulême Festival in 2008 with her book Mourir, Partir, Revenir : le Jeu des Hirondelles then in 2016 with Le Piano oriental.
In 2017, Zeina Abirached was decorated chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
