Jill Magid

This art project highlights the recent privatization of access to the work of the Mexican architect and engineer Luis Barragán (1902-1988). Considering the law as an artistic medium in its own right, Jill Magid is interested in its biases, flaws and possible détournements. 

Performance of Dearest Federica – 7:00pm, Level 4, Room 22 

Following her research into the intimate correspondence of architect Luis Barragán, Jill Magid reactivates love letters that she slightly modifies, and sends them to architectural historian Federica Zanco, who is the only one who currently has the architect’s professional archives, kept in Switzerland. The slideshow Dearest Fererica, gathering 80 photographic portraits of women found in Barragán’s archives, serves as a medium to this performance. 

Screening of The Proposal, followed by a talk with Jill Magid – 7:30 pm, Petite Salle, Forum -1 

In 2013, Jill Magid discovered that the professional archives of Luis Barragán, one of Mexico’s most famous architects, had been kept for nearly two decades in a bunker inaccessible to the public. In 1995, Barragán’s professional archive, including the rights to his name and work and all photographs taken of it, was purchased by Rolf Fehlbaum, the Chairman of the Swiss furniture company Vitra, who, so it is said, gifted it to his fiancé, Federica Zanco. During three years, Magid built a sprawling project, the story of which The Proposal traces and the final proposal: the gift of a two-carat diamond grown from the cremated remains of Barragán’s body and set into a ring, in exchange for the return of his archive to Mexico.