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Watch The Proposal: Start Streaming
Mexican architect and engineer Luis Barragán is a figure known in circles far beyond the world of architecture. The second-ever recipient of The Pritzker Prize (architecture’s highest honor) and a man whose house and studio became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004, Barragán continues to inspire architecture students, professionals, as well as art lovers the world over with his brightly colored geometric houses.
So, how come much of his work is inaccessible to the public? The story is quite a fascinating one.
In 1981—a mere seven years prior to his death—Barragán signed a will bequeathing his work and copyrights to his business partner Raúl Ferrara, also asking architect Ignacio Díaz Morales and two other commissioners to bequeath his library to an institution devoted to architecture. In 1993, Ferrara passed away, leaving Barragán’s professional archive to his widow, Rosario Uranga.
In 1995, after making attempts to sell Barragán’s professional archive in Mexico, Uranga consigned it to gallerist Max Protetch in New York. Then came Rolf Fehlbaum, the owner and CEO of Swiss furniture company Vitra who bought the archive from Protetch for approximately $2.5 million—before gifting it to his then-fiancée Federica Zanco, allegedly as a wedding present. The following year, The Barragán Foundation, directed by Zanco, was inaugurated at the Vitra headquarters in Switzerland, in a publicly inaccessible location.
This is precisely the point in the story where director Jill Magid’s The Proposal picks up. Premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, the film explores Magid’s close, personal connection with Barragán’s works, as well as her multi-year struggle to make his professional archive publicly accessible. With a run time of 83 minutes, the film is less a documentary than an artist’s passionate plea for the democratization of art.
Upon first visiting the UNESCO-listed Casa Luis Barragán and learning the fate of Barragán’s professional archive in 2012, American artist Jill Magid requests access to the archive—only to be rejected. Not one to give up, Magid contacts the Barragán family to discuss her ingenious idea. Over the next two years, as Magid maintains cordial communication with Zanco, the Barragán family get to work having the late architect’s ashes exhumed from the Rotonda de los Jaliscienses Ilustres in Guadalajara for what would end up being the highlight of Magid’s bold project: a diamond ring made from the ashes, personally presented by the artist to Federica Zanco on Vitra’s campus in 2016.
Watch The Proposal: Start Streaming
“As a visual artist and writer, I use my work to lend new perspectives to long-established structures of power in society,” says Magid. “The Proposal is my first feature film and the last chapter of a larger project I began in 2013, called The Barragán Archives. The project explores the contested legacy of Luis Barragán, Mexico’s most famous architect, and how his legacy is affected by the fact that a private corporation owns his archives and controls the rights in his name and work. For more than 20 years, this corporation has made his work largely inaccessible to the public. The film questions whether a single actor should be exclusively in control of how the world can engage with Barragán’s work. I believe that it is crucial to discuss how artistic legacy is constructed, shaped, and manipulated.”
