The Soft Bodies of Memory

Synopsis:
When Hadi Moussally speaks about Salma Zahore, he returns to an image from childhood. A material memory. A body that was not quite human and not quite object. One of the key inspirations behind the character of Salma Zahore comes from the foam mannequins of the 1970s and 1980s.

Hadi’s father was an interior designer and owned a shop, and inside it stood several of these mannequins. Their surfaces were often a single, uniform colour, frequently black, without texture, pores, or visible anatomy beyond the essential outline of a body. They did not aim to imitate life. They suggested it.

What fascinated Moussally was their strange elegance. The way their softness contradicted their function. The way they could be bent, folded, seated, or twisted into almost any pose. They were bodies without resistance. Bodies that accepted every gesture imposed on them.

They were often stylised in the simplest ways. A pair of sunglasses placed where eyes might be. A scarf wrapped around the head or just a wig. Earrings pinned directly into the foam. With only these minimal additions, the mannequins acquired a human presence even though their faces remained blank and without features. Identity was not fixed. It was assembled, improvised, and layered.

This physical malleability became an early lesson in how bodies can be shaped by context, by projection, by desire, and by gaze.

For Hadi, this process of dressing, altering, and reconfiguring these figures planted the seeds for Salma Zahore as a character who is never entirely stable, never fully resolved. Salma is not a fixed persona but a surface in motion. A figure that absorbs cultural codes, visual tropes, and emotional projections.

Like the mannequins, Salma Zahore exists somewhere between object and subject, between display and agency. She is stylised, composed, and at times deliberately artificial. Yet this artificiality is not empty. It is charged. It becomes a way of speaking about how identities are constructed, especially in relation to gender, belief, visibility, and performance.

Starring: Salma Zahore
Photographer: Gabriel Venzi
Artistic Director: Hadi Moussally
Location: La Muriel

Full article on Kaltblut Magazine