Once we reached out to a public-art fund in Los Angeles and offered ourselves as candidates for a project.

They said yes — and invited us to build a piece in Downtown LA for the birthday of the Fashion District.

The brief was simple:

use local materials from the district — the fabrics sold in the Indian shops — and make something.

We proposed a fabric anemone, inflated by fans, waving its soft little fingers.

We sketched the idea with a pencil on a napkin, sent it in… and they approved the napkin sketch.

Not just casually — it went through a full city committee and still got approved.

How a pencil doodle survived that process, we have no idea.

When we arrived in LA, they handed us a full production hangar — supposedly the same one used for Coachella builds, or some similar festival.

We started constructing the anemone.
At some point it became clear that the object was turning out… strange.

Clumsy.
A bit tacky.
We wanted to adjust the design, experiment, rethink it on the fly — the normal creative process.
But because the approved sketch was the pencil drawing, we were firmly, politely, and almost aggressively told: “No experiments. Build exactly this.”

So we did.
And what came out was a weird creature that we didn’t like and the client didn’t like either.

We flew home disappointed, frustrated, a bit humiliated by this failed international adventure.

And a week later, the object burned down during the exhibition.
Incorrect wiring. Short circuit. Gone.
A perfect irony.

A failed project we aren’t ashamed to talk about — because even failed projects are still projects, and we learned a lot while making this little monster.