A veces duermo con los ojos abiertos

A veces duermo con los ojos abiertos (Sometimes I sleep with my eyes open) “Playgrounds are temporary worlds within the ordinary world. Inside it, a special order reigns,” Johan Huizinga writes. “It creates order: it is order.” In A veces duermo con los ojos abiertos, Andrea Ferrero stages a fantasy playground where gargoyles and grotesques descend from high facades to become uncanny playthings. Exploring the slippery threshold between the playful and the perverse in this unhinged fantasy, once-untouchable symbols of power—grotesqueries, ornamental spikes, and monstrous colonial archetypes—mutate into slides, swings, and see-saws, disarmed through touch and play. Inviting the audience to climb, swing, and move, the interactive installation transforms childhood nightmares into a surreal stage of re-imagining and the playground into a dream-space of distorted memory. Staged inside a Porfirian-era mansion in the heart of Guadalajara, it creates a site of theatricalized control, drawing from imperial motifs in both garden and fortress design, while also pulling from intimate, personal histories. Once imagined as unreachable, grotesques now stand unprotected at eye level—absurd yet delightful, menacing and seductive all at once. Fragments of a larger myth and an aestheticized control system, these figures are recast, recalling hostile architectures of safety that, beneath grandiose façades, always carried the menace of violence.