The Bath Fugues

Abstract

This work takes the form of three interwoven novellas: three meditations on friendship based on Montaigne’s Essays. The research was centred around the themes of art forgery … in particular the forgeries perpetrated by the Red Brigades… and that of the falsification of identity. It incorporates research into the fugue, in both its musical and psychological forms. The work interrogates the structures of identity by examining Macanese ethnicity and surveying the justice system in Macau in the 1920s, where Chinese law existed side by side with Portuguese colonial wealth. Power and bloodlines played important roles in determining the posterity or otherwise of the family. Assumed identity and falsification of heritage were common practices.