The Royal Television Award award-winning film maker, musician and sound artist, Sofia Mellander (aka Salt), was presented with the 2022 Foulis Medal at The Glasgow School of Art winter graduations on 3 November 2022. The medal, which is awarded to the top student on a taught Masters programme at the GSA, was presented at Winter Graduation in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Top students in the five Schools were meanwhile awarded Chairman’s Medals: Wattana Songpetchmongkol, (MArch Architectural Studies), Len Goetzee (MLitt Fine Art), Dan Hou, (MDes Fashion & Textiles), Mariana Acosta Morales, (MDes Design Innovation & Service Design) and Monika Keenan, (MSc Heritage Visualisation)

Foulis Medal awardee, Sofia Mellander, who won a Royal Television Award for her short film, Without Christina in 2018, graduated from the GSA with an Master of Design in Sound for the Moving Image. Her Postgraduate Degree Show project - Control my Bodliless Form - is a satirical and absurd look at the “numbness, joy, and horror” that exists online. Following a call-out for people to share their cyber experiences (anonymously) she not surprisingly received many recounting experiences of grooming, doxxing, antisemitism, stalking, trolling, homophobia, racism, and self-harm, but there were also stories of finding community, inspiration, creativity, even romantic love. Sofia wove these experiences into three audio-visual pieces, examining what on earth is happening to us in cyberspace.

“Sofia Mellander’s practice brings together the unlikely pairing of Swedish folk music and social media, combining the two in a trilogy of short performance films: Control My Bodiless Form,” said Programme Leader Ronan Breslin. “The work is in turns amusing, absurd, and darkly disturbing. In merging two culturally and aesthetically diverse concepts. She has created a satirical and utterly beguiling set of music videos that modernize the folk music genre, through subverting the conventions of sound and story-telling often found within it.”

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