by Jill Magid, USA 2018, 83'
| SCREENPLAY: Jill Magid | SOUNDTRACK: T. Griffin | |
| SHOOTING: Jarred Alterman | PRODUCER: Jarred Alterman, Charlotte Cook, Laura Coxson | |
| EDITING: Hannah Buck | LANGUAGE: VO: English; Sub: Italian |
Presented at Lo schermo dell'arte 2019
American artist Jill Magid’s film traces the project for an exhibition inspired by Mexican architect Luis Barragàn’s work. She faced difficulties in consulting Barragàn’s archives, which are divided between Mexico City and Basel, especially with Federica Manco, who owns the Swiss archive, and the rights associated with the reproduction of Barragàn’s work. After numerous refusals, and following a residency in Barragàn’s home in Mexico City, where the private archive is kept, Magid’s exhibition project for the San Francisco Art Institute, scheduled for Autumn 2016, inevitably changed. The artist decided to display documents, letters, photographs and works related to the inaccessible Swiss archive, and to tell her story in a film. Built around the epistolary relationship with Federica Manco, The Proposal’s culminating moment is the exhumation of Barragàn’s ashes, from which Magid created a diamond to offer to her interlocutor in exchange for access to the archive. The story sparked an art world debate on the American artist’s ethics: is her work a necrophiliac outrage against Barragàn’s memory? Or a legitimate means to make the Mexican architect’s work accessible to the Mexican public and the world?
Jill Magid
Born in 1973 in Connecticut, she works mainly with performance. Magid has collaborated with various organizations and authority structures, including law enforcement and secret services. Her works have been shown at the Tate Modern in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. She received awards from the Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten, the Netherland-American Foundation
Fellowship Fullbright Grant, and won the Calder Prize in 2017. She has participated in Manifesta, and the Liverpool, Lyon, Singapore, Gothenburg Biennials. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker Art Center, among others. The Proposal is her directorial debut.