FAILE Temple

FAILE's documentation of Temple, the full-scale ruin of a chapel that the Brooklyn duo built on Lisbon's Praça dos Restauradores for the Portugal Arte 10 festival in 2010.

Modelled on the remains of a Baroque chapel, the temporary structure carried frescoes, tiled surfaces and sculptural figures drawn from FAILE's own vocabulary of pulp heroines and hand-lettered slogans, translated into carved stone, painted plaster and azulejo-style ceramic tile. The book, designed by the artists and published by Gestalten in 2012, records the finished installation in detail and traces its making, from the historical ornament and devotional imagery that fed the design through construction and installation on site. An essay by the critic W. Ian Bourland reads the project against the duo's wider work. The linen-bound cover reproduces the temple's blue-and-white tile pattern.

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller have worked together as FAILE since 1999, moving between street interventions, painting, sculpture and immersive environments. Temple was their most ambitious public project to that date; the book sits between Gestalten's FAILE: Prints + Originals 1999–2009 and FAILE: Works on Wood.