Fuguestate
In rural England, 2005, a man in a dinner suit was found wandering alone in the rain. Silent, with all the labels removed from his clothing, he offered no name. When handed a pencil, he drew a piano. When placed at one, he played for hours. No one could say what the music was.
Fuguestate drew on this haunting real-life mystery to explore the intersection of memory, identity, and music. Developed in collaboration with composer Joseph Giovinazzo, the work was both an immersive sound installation and a poetic meditation on fugue in its many forms: musical, psychological, metaphysical.
Set within the charged architecture of the United Masonic Centre in Melbourne, the performance unfolded through a custom-built system of spatially responsive audio which mapped musical phrases onto people, rooms and shadows of the space itself.
“In this powerful, immersive piece Maling and Giovinazzo create an unsettling sense of loss and poetry, weaving their web of music and stories through empty rooms and foreboding spaces.”
— Broadsheet Melbourne
Team:
Lead artist - Jason Maling
Sound composition - Joseph Giovinazzo
Producer - Anna Schoo
Technical system design - Cake Industries (Jesse Stevens, Dean Petersen)
Film documentation - Takeshi Kondo (Man of the Tree)
Graphic Design - Emma Rickards
Premiered, 2012, United Masonic Centre, Melbourne.
Nominated for a 2013 Greenroom award.