Battle for Filly Castle began with a gift: a Filly Castle and a group of colorful Filly horses, given to me by the daughter of a friend. We had often played with it together, but when she grew older she lost interest and passed it on to me so that I could continue playing alone. And that is exactly what I did…

As in my series My Matchbox Cars in Dangerous Situations, one idea stood at the center: What happens when an intact toy world is suddenly confronted with danger? Children instinctively create threats in their games — they summon monsters, invent small catastrophes, let chaos erupt. I wanted to pick up this narrative impulse again. I still had a rhinoceros beetle from the Matchbox series, and immediately a connection between the two bodies of work suggested itself. The “bugs” became the attackers of the pastel fortress — some I found on eBay, others were made by an artist I exhibited with, who created insect sculptures from various materials.

What emerged was a deliberately trashy scenario: the candy-colored idyll of the Filly universe under siege by imperialistic beetles determined to conquer it. A miniature world in which genres collide — the sweetness of Filly horses meets horror, action, and sci-fi tropes. The association with Starship Troopers, that much-misunderstood film balancing satire and action cinema, was hard to ignore. Above all, this setting is meant to be fun. This is slasher humor, where the body count takes center stage. It’s fiction, it’s pulp, it’s a glorious little massacre — the only thing missing, really, is the film that ought to accompany the artwork.