Doppelgänger: from the German Doppel, “double,” and Gänger, “walker.” The double who walks beside us. At times, a usurper of identities, at others, a ghostly presence able to inhabit two places at once. A reflection that slips away from the mirror.

Contemporary physics speaks of parallel universes, of strings vibrating in hidden dimensions, of infinite planes where we coexist across multiple pasts, presents, and futures. Within this prism, the doppelgänger multiplies endlessly: a constellation of selves that divide and contradict one another, each claiming its own right to exist.

But there is a darker side to this figure: the impulse of “I want to be you.” We live in an age of impostors, surrounded by doubles who steal not only images, but identities and lives they long to inhabit. Copying others to conceal the mediocrity of the self, deceivers who eventually confuse their own fabrication with reality.

And yet, we all occasionally wish to live other lives. Cinema allows us this, if only for moments: to become someone else, to feel ourselves transformed. I am fascinated by the actor’s doppelgänger—by that instant in which, while building a character, the boundary between fiction and reality is crossed, and what unfolds on screen feels no longer like representation, but lived experience.

That same risk pulses at the heart of creation itself: walking the edge of obsession, oscillating between lucidity and madness, inhabiting territories where objective reality dissolves. Perhaps this is the secret of creative work—an honest attempt to become one’s own double, a symbolic act of self-division. A doppelgänger woven into every collection.