This practice-led PhD project began as a deeply personal enquiry, sparked by the discovery that my mother was reclassified as white under apartheid in 1984, just a year before I was born. This intimate revelation unsettled the foundational narratives of my identity and exposed the extent to which the apartheid state sought to codify and control racial categorisation—not just in public life, but within the most private dimensions of family and selfhood. My mother’s reclassification was not only a bureaucratic act but also a form of state-authored fiction, one that reveals the performative and constructed nature of race under apartheid. Her story, while singular, is embedded within a larger historical system designed to enforce racial boundaries yet also marked by moments of quiet subversion and survival. In this sense, my research begins at the threshold where personal narrative meets state archive—where the body becomes both document and site of resistance.