The Proposal

American conceptual artist and writer Jill Magid’s first film is ostensibly a celebration of modernist Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902-1988), who won the Pritzker Prize in 1980. But its real purpose is to penetrate the control over his archives wielded by a woman who limits accessibility. Through interviews with Barragán’s friends and colleagues in Mexico, Magid details how the materials were sold to a Swiss businessman whose wife, Federica Zanco, an architectural scholar, took charge of as president of the Barragán Foundation. The organization’s supposed purpose is to encourage wider appreciation of Barragán’s work, but in practice it has restricted use of the archives by outsiders. Much of the film consists of readings from letters exchanged between Magid and Zanco, the former requesting access to the archives while the latter politely refuses. And then, with permission from Barragán’s family, Magid makes a startling proposal to Zanco, offering her a diamond made from the architect’s cremated ashes if she returns the archives to Mexico. She even clandestinely films the meeting with Zanco and her husband where she unveils this idea. The Proposal is less a work about Barragán than a piece of performance art in which Magid seeks to break through the wall of secrecy that Zanco’s foundation has built around Barragán’s archives. As such it represents an intriguing and often amusing example of Magid’s idiosyncratic art in practice. Recommended. (F. Swietek)