Just before waking on a quiet Sunday morning, I found myself in a vast studio — not a room, but a space so large the work happened on the floor itself.
I was not writing on paper.
I was arranging letters.
Each one enormous.
Each one in its own font.
Red. Blue. Sand-coloured.
Some were moulded from plastic.
Others felt like brick or tile — heavy, textured, almost architectural.
Together they formed a phrase:
A CON ART
I remember standing there, thinking about the word con.
Not only hoodwink or deception.
But contrast.
contract.
contempt.
And then the second half of the word opened up too.
Art as artistic.
Art as article.
Art as articulate.
The letters lay across the floor like pieces of a city still under construction.
At first the place felt like Green Point, the polished art district of Cape Town.
But slowly the scene shifted.
Now we were on the Cape Flats.
A huge house stood there — not a gallery, not a school — but a gathering place where artists were working everywhere, across rooms and levels. Some painted, some built, some simply wandered through the space studying the work.
Through the centre of the house ran enormous pipes, wide enough for a person to slide through. Artists moved through them, laughing — disappearing from one level and arriving somewhere else entirely, like the playful tunnels in Meet the Robinsons.
Ideas slipping between worlds.
Artists carried from one moment to another.
Art unfolding wherever it arrives.
I woke just as the letters were still being arranged on the floor.
The work was not finished yet.
But the space for it
was already there.
The phrase lingered with me long after waking.
Was the dream only about art?
Or was it about the strange theatre of our time?
Is the world itself becoming a kind of con art?
Empires shaping the stories we see.
Mass media arranging the very letters of reality.
Images of destruction and violence flowing endlessly across our screens.
Are we witnessing truth?
Or are we watching a carefully constructed stage?
And what of us — the quiet participants in this spectacle?
Are we artists, trying to rearrange meaning on the floor of the world?
Or are we simply scrolling through the ruins, mistaking the performance for reality?