Paranoia (2022-Present)

My art persona exists in a hyper paranoid state because I willingly subjected myself to a tactical driving course and various other programmes relating to self defence as a project (2022-present). If it weren’t for my training I wouldn’t be sweating in the right turning lane right now because of the fact that I know it prevents evasive manoeuvrability and increases chance of armed hijacking attempts in South Africa.

Text to Self (15/03/2025)
Paranoia (2022-Present) is not a project in the traditional sense. It does not seek presentation or critique. It is a system of engagement, a recursive loop in which learned paranoia feeds back into itself. It alters my relationship to space and movement. It is something that has been adopted and is currently inhabited.

The project began in 2022 with tactical driving training. I was taught evasive manoeuvrability, risk calculation, and real-time situational analysis – techniques designed for high-risk professionals navigating volatile environments. I was taught that preparedness is a form of power. Paranoia interrogates the paradox of this power: heightened awareness provides a sense of control, but how can one feel secure in a state of permanent vigilance?

Post-apartheid South Africa is structured around security. High walls, electric fences, armed response units – defensive measures but also spatial expressions of fear. Fear dictates urban design, determining who moves where and under what conditions. This logic extends beyond infrastructure; it is psychological, behavioural. Paranoia is an internalisation of this system. I have subjected my body and mind to the structures of surveillance, control, and power that govern South African life.

By 2023, the project expanded into tactical firearms training. The men who trained me were mostly white Afrikaners, ex-military or private security contractors, still operating within the psychological remnants of the ‘swart-gevaar’ – the apartheid-era fear of Black revolt. Their paranoia was generational. The tactics they taught were ideological, informed by a worldview where threat perception was racialised. This is the architecture of security in South Africa. Paranoia is a question of how these systems construct the subject that inhabits them.

Foucault’s theory of biopolitics describes how power regulates bodies, conditioning movement and structuring behaviour. Paranoia accelerates this logic: I am not subjected to a security apparatus – I become one. Unlike performance art, which operates within staged conditions, Paranoia rejects containment beyond the mind – the work is exhibited by its own enactment. There is no audience, no controlled environment.

My mind is trained to anticipate threat, to move preemptively, to see risk where none has yet materialised. Paranoia is a form of internalised governance, where survival strategies replace instinct. It does not declare itself as art, yet the moment it enters institutional space, it is gallerised by default.

2025: the distinction between my practice and being is blurred. Once learned, paranoia cannot be unlearned. I remain within the work. The work is not conceptual. It is consequential.