The Proposal
“What happens to an artist’s legacy when it’s controlled by a corporation?” This is the central question in Jill Magid’s 2018 documentary The Proposal. In 1995, Swiss furniture company Vitra purchased the intellectual property rights and massive professional archive of Luis Barragán, a highly influential 20th-century Mexican architect. For decades, Mexican art historians and artists have asked Federica Zanco, the Swiss guardian of the work, that Barragán’s archive be made public and returned to its rightful home in Mexico. She has refused. In her impressionistic doc, Magid, a conceptual artist, concocts a perfect plan—or proposal, if you will—that could potentially bring Barragán’s archive out of private hands.
by Jas Keimig