The Last Greeting + The Proposal - DocPoint 2019

The Last Greeting



Director: Mark Soosaar

Country: Eesti

Year: 1981

Length: 10 min

The Proposal

Jill Magid’s personally political The Proposal elegantly polemicizes questions regarding art and the ownership and control over works of art.

The inheritance of the acclaimed Mexican architect Luis Barragán was divided in his will to a personal and professional archive, the latter of them having been out of reach of the general public and under the ownership of Swiss Vitra for several decades. Vitra also owns the right to the artist’s name.

Barragán’s personal life is however still present and tangible in his home country Mexico where the subtly barren rooms accentuate the fact how the image and experience of Barragán remains incomplete without the artist’s professional and artistic dimension. Barragán’s style has been described as the architecture of silence. The silence of Barragán’s buildings is deafening in the pictures of Magid, where they stand on soil that has no right to the art inside them.

Magid corresponds relentlessly with Federica Zanco, who’s the wife of Vitra’s CEO Rolf Fehlbaum. Magid ends up with an underlining and poetic proposal. What is the value of an artist to their loved ones? How significant is the nationality of the artist? How far do the lines of ownership reach?

Petra Vallila / Translation: Miia Mäkelä

Language: English

Director: Jill Magid

Country: USA

Year: 2018

Length: 83 min

Cinematography: Jarred Alterman

Editing: Hannah Buck, T. Griffin, Nels Bangerter

Production: Charlotte Cook, Laura Coxson, Jarred Alterman / Field of Vision