Fugue

Sheila, a 19-year-old girl, travels to the divided and gloomy Berlin to study music. She plays in front of the admired Professor Pascal and he replies obscurely that she must “start from scratch.” On the whim of a moment she rents a cello and starts playing. At one point the story gives way to a novel by Thomas Tuck – perhaps Sheila’s future love – that takes place in 2023 in a divided and regulated Amsterdam.

This story-within-a-story revolves around a barefooted man that rescues a woman from drowning, who suffers from what the doctors call a “Dissociative Fugue”. Three weeks earlier, during a routine morning run, her life story was completely erased. These different stories branch out and into each other manifesting a mesmerizing textual structure of a fugue. Represented through a variety of forms, they express the human urge to escape the tyranny of the biography and transcend the prison of the self.

In “Fugue”, Adi Kaplan and Shahar Carmel succeeded in creating a unique, haunting combination between effective use of words and expressive paintings.