Ben Winfield Art: Securitas Absurdus

In early 2010 three university students, Pakiso Moqobane, Dominic Giddy, and Dane van Zyl, were murdered within a couple of months of each other on the streets of Cape Town. Although hundreds of murders happen every year, what separated these murders from all the others was the fact that they were students, like me, going about their university lives unaware of the horror that would befall them.

This led me to explore the fear I have of being killed randomly for something as trivial as my cellphone. I began by looking at existing security methods, which in turn led me to construct various imagined and absurd ways to protect myself, and possibly others, against equally random and absurd acts of violence that have become accepted as part of South African society today.

Although inspired by real-life events, my work takes on an inventive approach, exploring various possibilities of self-protection both at home and on the street. In the sculpture I'm just popping out to buy some milk… I explore the idea of self-preservation through overly excessive body armour, whilst in the Nightmare series I parody the excessive use of security systems that many suburban homes employ in order to protect themselves from any lurking threat. In other works such as Camera Securitas and Parricus Electricus, my representation of real-world security systems such as closed-circuit television cameras and electric fencing, is meant to highlight how such methods of security, usually employed by prisons and concentration camps to keep people inside, have been seamlessly adopted into our everyday lives to keep the villains out.

Whether we choose to accept it or not, the very nature of our existence is defined by our fear of violence. By setting up barriers between ourselves and the world around us, we allow violence to exist in a world outside of our walls. We do not have to worry about what is being done because we feel a sense of security, no matter how fragile that security is.

Just as our use of security systems does not directly address or deal with the causes of violent acts, such as what drives a person to commit the murder of innocent students, my art does not attempt to seek answers to the violence that encompasses us on every side. Rather it accepts violence as a given, presenting it as a normality that we all seek to survive, if only for a while.