Mia Salsjö

Mia Salsjö’s multidisciplinary practice is concerned with self-reflexive processes of translation and scoring. For The National 4, Salsjö has conceived a new installation in response to the iconic structure of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Comprising drawing, sound, and performance, the work continues the artist’s investigation of the transposition of architectural forms into site-specific musical compositions.

In developing this work, Salsjö has performed a layered process of interpretation, drawing on research mined from public collections as well as state archives. As with all of her site-specific compositions, Salsjö began with architectural studies, which she transcribed into a coded system of numbers, lines, and dots. These algorithmic marks were then expanded into a series of rhizomatic drawings, revealing visual and sonic patterns within the built structure. Exhibited in the galleries, these drawings act as graphic scores for Salsjö’s final musical composition.

In addition to working with architectural plans, Salsjö has engaged in an embodied and spiritual reading of the bridge. The final composition draws on the aesthetic and symbolic resonances of the arc in music as a notation which indicates ‘legato’ – or the joining of one note to the next in a smooth and connected manner – and, in architecture, as a device which bridges time and space. For Salsjö, the form of the arc conveys ideas of triumph, transcendence, and the elevation of the spirit. It is also an essentially life-affirming one, which echoes the rise and fall of one’s breath.

These points of reference overlap with Salsjö’s embodied experience of the bridge. Climbing the bridge on foot, Salsjö came to reflect on the structure as a living organism which absorbs and responds to its environment, reverberating under the weight of the traffic it carries, and eroding from the salt air it breathes in. This interpretation of the bridge was integral to Salsjö’s decision to compose the piece for a brass ensemble, with instruments which reflect the materiality and vibration of the bridge and render the musician’s breath and resignation audible.

As a document which transcribes sound, rhythm, and tempo into visual symbols, the score can be understood as a form of translation itself. In Salsjö’s works, this process is extended to encompass the translation of the imaginative and emotive potential of built architecture, through the musical architecture of composition. By employing the score as both process and outcome in her work, Salsjö’s work defies the traditional understanding of the score as a document which exists primarily to determine the execution of a live performance, complicating the conventional chronology of score–performance–documentation. Utilised instead for its generative potential, the score can be understood in Salsjö’s work as a device that translates as well as ‘trans-acts’ (to borrow a term from Hendrik Folkerts) visual language, the built environment, musical composition, live performance, and documentation. (1) It is through this process of trans-action that Salsjö asks us to reflect on the nature of communication – its potentialities, successes, and failures – itself.

(1) Hendrik Folkerts, ‘Keeping score: Notation, embodiment, and liveness’, documenta 14, 2017, retrieved 1 November 2022, https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/464_keeping_score_notation_embodiment_and_liveness