Conceptual artist and ACT alumna Jill Magid’s (SMVisS ’00) documentary, The Proposal, which chronicles her project to resurrect the life and art of Luis Barragán, premieres at Cambridge’s Landmark Cinema in Kendall Square on Thursday, July 27. The Premiere is sponsored by MITArchA (MIT Architecture Alumni) and Oscilloscope Labs. This exclusive viewing of the film will be followed by remarks by MIT Department of Architecture Professor Caroline Jones.
Date and Location:
Landmark Theatres Kendall Square Cinema
One Kendall Square, at 355 Binney Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
June 27, 2019 / 7 PM to 9 PM
Event Program:
Doors Open: 7:00pm
Showtime: 7:20pm
Q&A: 8:45-9pm
Tickets:
Students, MIT10 Graduates, and MITArchA Members: $10
Non-Members and Guests:$20
The Proposal is part of a larger project that Jill began in 2013 – The Barragán Archives. The Barragán Archives is an extended, multimedia project examining of the legacy of Mexican architect and Pritzker Prize-winner Luis Barragán (1902–1988). Magid considers both Barragán’s professional and personal archives, and how the intersections of his official and private selves reveal divergent and aligned interests, as well as those of the institutions that have become the archives’ guardians.
In her Director’s Statement Jill wrote that “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, Vitra, owns his archives and controls the rights in his name and work. For more than twenty 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.”
The project is likely best known for the highly controversial move in which Jill had Barragán’s burial vault exhumed (with his family’s permission), took some of his ashes, and had those ashes pressed into a diamond. The diamond was subsequently set into a ring which she offered to Frederica Zanco, who controls access to the archive. This, itself, plays on the rumor that Vitra heir Rolf Fehlbaum bought the archives for Zanco in lieu of an engagement ring, and is representative of Jill’s work which often subtly undermines institutions of authority.