Mal de archivo

March 26, 2017 4:26 PM

At his death in 1988, Luis Barragán, the Pritzker laureate Mexican architect of poetic modernist reknown, left his house and library to an architect friend, and his voluminous professional archive to his business associate. This archive eventually found its way to a New York gallerist, from whom it was bought in 1998 and shipped to Basel by a wealthy Swiss businessman for his fiancé - and has been inaccessible ever since. When conceptual artist Jill Magid (previously) heard of the archive's predicament in 2013, she devised her project The Barragán Archives, whose final chapter might bring about a resoluton: in a pact with the architect's family and the Mexican authorities, by way of a transubstantiation of ashes into a diamond, as a participant in "a gothic love story, with a copyright-and-intellectual-property-rights subplot", she would approach the guarded, private owners of Barragán's legacy with a profound, confounding offer about his body of work - she would make The Proposal.

Further materials:

- the trailer to a film on the project (commissioned by Laura Poitras' Field of Vision).

- Magid speaks about the project to ArtForum

- several critiques of the project, and a considered reply (GoogleTranslate-resistantly in Spanish), from a Mexican perspective.

- as a result of the local controversy raised by Magid's project, the authorities of Guadalajara are drafting previously missing legislation regarding the ownership of cremated remains. (No word yet on any proposal for what to do with the archive, should it actually be returned.)

- Casa Barragán recently hosted a film project investigating the copyright issues pertaining to the vast record collection the architect left behind: Open House | Divided Estates.


The FPP title presumes a translation of Derrida.

posted by progosk (4 comments total)

How interesting! I didn't know anything about this. I'm not a big fan of Barragan's buildings (there's a few in my city) but love to read storys about "great people" from the past.
posted by CrazyLemonade at 9:29 PM on March 26, 2017

Weird. I swear to Mod there was another post on this previously, but I will be damned forever if I can seem to find it.
posted by Samizdata at 1:57 AM on March 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Barragán was and still is a great influence in Mexican architects, specially in Guadalajara.

So much that the city is full of barraganesque monstrosities. Where the architect copies the forms and the colors, but does not get the intention.

The best way to appreciate a Barragán house is in a scorching summer afternoon in Guadalajara. Sit down in any room, open the windows, have a drink I and read a book. His houses are oasis of shade and green and birdsong in the middle of a noisy sweltering city.

I'd love to know how much money changed hands and how many favors were called for a foreign artist to be allowed to get a bag full of Barragan's ashes from the Rotonda.

The expatriation and privatization of the archives was terrible cultural plunder, British empire kind of bullshit.

How did anyone think that plundering the ashes would make anything better?
posted by Dr. Curare at 11:52 AM on March 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

So, from an appreciative, local point of view, both moments - first, the private "entombing" of the archive, and then the un-tombing of the ashes - strike you as plunder?
There are so many aspects to this story, I'm really interested in how it's been (and how it could be) framed.
posted by progosk at 12:20 PM on March 27, 2017