Extending earlier investigations into fortresses, architectures of security, and imperial gardens, You Can’t Stop the World from Being Bad traces spatial logics of power to an intimate terrain shaped by childhood imagination and world-building, where systems of control are first encountered at a miniature scale and fantasies of protection, owner-ship, and power begin to take shape. Recalling softened versions of defense architecture, castle towers, gates, ornamental details, and protective elements oscillate between the intimate and the architectural. Drawing on Little Tikes castles, dollhouses and tiny Polly Pocket environments – contained worlds designed to be held, arranged and governed– Ferrero returns to an early encounter with space and fiction as something magical yet clinically staged, considering play as a formative site.

Borrowing from the structure of fairy tales and early videogame logic, the exhibition unfolds as a sequence of thresholds, turning the gallery into a fragmented castle interior where each room reveals a new level, obstacle, or reward. Sheer curtains veil the gallery walls, partially revealing what’s hidden behind them and drawing us inward into a private, constructed world that takes us from a child-sized castle watched by toy security cameras, through a pack of barking dogs, to a garden where a trapdoor offers a final escape route. Revisiting a moment when our understanding of the world remains open, unstable, and deeply permeable, gestures of intimacy merge with mechanisms of restriction, while attachment and possession become difficult to detangle.