LESLIE MOODY CASTRO: Can you explain your choice of title, “Ex-Voto”? Specifically, how do the story of The Barragán Archives and the work The Proposal operate in tandem with one another?

JILL MAGID: The Barragán Archives, which I began in 2013, is an extended, multimedia project examining of the legacy of Luis Barragán. At the core of the project is the question of artistic legacy: how it is constructed, manipulated, accessed, and controlled. In ideal circumstances, artistic legacy is shared, as a gift. The Proposal is a climactic artwork within The Barragán Archives project that includes a genuine diamond produced from the cremated remains of Luis Barragán, set into an engagement ring, and offered to Federica Zanco, Director of the Barragan Foundation, in exchange for the return of Barragán’s archive to Mexico and the public.

“Ex-Voto” ran concurrent to The Proposal’s exhibition in Switzerland, and its title refers to the series of four works I am showing within the exhibition. Collectively called The Miracles, each Ex-Voto is a cast tin horse painted by a professional ex-voto painter that I hired in Mexico City, whom I provided with images and texts. Ex-voto literally means, “from the vow made,” or “according to the promise I made.” The Barragán Archives is the result of many years’ worth of research and engagement, meaningful relationships, and forged partnerships and the ex-votos I made offer gratitude to those inspiring collaborations, our shared commitments, and to what I believe to be their miraculous outcomes.

A votive offering is a gift for the dead, intended to be buried with them, and not to be recouped by the living. An ex-voto, like a legacy, remains in the realm of the living.

How is this exhibition either mimicking the process of an ex-voto or acting as a metaphor for it?

To make The Proposal, and to do the necessary work and research of The Barragán Archives (of which this work is a part) required, I collaborated and partnered with many people and institutions, including the Barragán family, art organizations, non-profit organizations, government bodies, lawyers, professors, architects, and more. I wanted to make a work that would thank these partners, these bodies, for their collaboration and for our various relationships that grew from our collaborations. Together, we expanded our understandings of legacy and how it can be lived, and activated. Traditional ex-votos offered a beautiful form for gratitude, and they inspired my own versions of them.

You’ve talked about this project in terms of a love triangle in your exhibitions “Woman With Sombrero,” at Art in General in 2013, Yvon Lambert in 2014, and MAZ in 2014. Can you describe this role?

It is important to me that my work goes beyond metaphor, engaging the law and structures of control in both its finished form as well as through the process of creation. I believe that an understanding of how artistic legacy is constructed, shaped, manipulated, and shared is an important cultural issue. I don’t see art or an archive as a fixed or dead body, but as something alive and that continues to give. That’s not inevitable: to do so, it must be kept alive by remaining accessible, with the possibility for continual engagement. 

An artist’s work is complete at their death, but their legacy is in its infancy. I’m trying to understand Barragán and his legacy. And my effort to understand myself in relation to them is part of the work of The Barragán Archives, which I explored in the exhibition “Woman With Sombrero,” and others. While I was not permitted to see Barragán’s professional archive at the Barragán Foundation in Switzerland, I was given full access to his personal archive at Casa Barragán in Mexico City. Much of the first few years of the project grew from my research and hands-on exploration of the personal archive, and my inability to access the professional archive.

You have traditionally worked with systems of surveillance and loopholes in laws, as in the Failed States project (2012). Why did you decide to focus on Barragán and his legacy?

My work has continued to center around themes of access, power and the law since I first started showing in 1999. Before The Barragán Archives, I’d mainly engaged with government institutions such as CCTV operations, police, and secret services. With The Barragán Archives, I entered into a new territory of privatized power. I wanted to understand what it meant for an artist’s legacy to be controlled by Vitra, a corporation. To do so, I needed to engage with copyright law, intellectual property rights, and fair use doctrine.

I’ve explored questions around artistic legacy within my work before. Auto Portrait Pending (2005), is a work that confronts my own legacy, by way of my physical body and its relationship to the art market. To make the work, I signed a contract with a company to become a diamond when I die, which will be set in a gold ring. Until the diamond′s creation, the artwork exists only of the empty ring setting, the corporate contract, and a series of documents. While The Proposal takes on a similar form — a diamond with attendant paperwork — it does so in a very different context, with a different intention. The Proposal is a gift, intended to inspire another gift: the repatriation of Barragán’s archive to Mexico and its free accessibility to the public. 

There have been some criticisms of the project. Can you speak openly about this? And was it simply fascination that led to a genuine offer of the ring to Ms. Zanco?

Yes, I am always looking for opportunities in my work to directly engage systems of power, and to find the human core within a seemingly impenetrable system. In this case I found a powerful artist’s legacy that is constricted by corporate power.

Yet The Proposal is created and offered as a gift. It is both an artwork and a potential tool of negotiation. The ring avoids the market completely by not being for sale; it is non-transactional and therefore opens up the possibility of lasting relationships created by the act of gift exchange. The ring may only be exchanged for the return and public access to the archive.

Gift-giving is the transfer of property rights over particular objects. Property is not a thing, but a relationship among people through things. In order to remain alive, an artist’s legacy must be shared, experienced, and open. Offering the ring to Ms. Zanco is an opportunity to bring Barragán’s legacy out of private control and back to the commons.

What would happen after the archive is returned to Mexico? Where would it live, is there a plan?

As stated in The Family Agreement, a contract between the family and myself, about The Proposal:

The Artwork will exist in two periods: the proposal period and the engagement period. The Artwork will be displayed during both periods, as described in The Agreement.

The Artist will offer the Ring to the Archivist, in Switzerland, at the first exhibition of the Artwork. This offer will initiate the proposal period. In order for the Archivist to receive the Ring, she must agree to relocate the Archive from the Barragan Foundation, in Birsfelden, Switzerland, to a publicly accessible site or institution in Mexico. The Archivist may accept the Ring and the terms of the offer at any moment.

If the Archivist accepts the offer, the Family, the Archivist, and other relevant parties will negotiate the terms of the Archive’s relocation.

As you see from the contract, once The Archivist (Ms. Zanco) accepts The Proposal, she, the family and other relevant parties will negotiate a publicly accessible site in Mexico. This may be a library or a university, or similar, or perhaps even a new building built specifically for it. There are many possibilities.

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LESLIE MOODY CASTRO: I had the pleasure of attending your talk at SOMA, and I was really interested in how you spoke about the idea of art and the utopian, and its relationship to Cuba. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this?

WILFREDO PRIETO: Yes, it’s about the importance of art in a social universe, but the reality is that it’s not understood in every society as a Utopia as such. My experience with utopias was also shaped romantically in this sense. Cuba considers art to be a social and philosophical moment, and each of those facets has a hierarchy. I think that placing those conditions on art in Cuba makes us think a lot about understanding art in a different way. It’s not just about concepts, such as education or the existence of a cultural life, but also involves the difficulties that exist in life, and how much art can give back to our life. There is something really rich about seeing art with a different lens and focus.

What are your thoughts on utopia within the context of Mexico? How do you think your work translates in Mexico, and the distinct location of Kurimanzutto Gallery?

Much more than a context, art is something that in aspects of life comes in and makes contexts more profound, rather than relying or depending on a context. Remaining dependent on a context places different conditions, which are clearly reflected differently. Mexico is, of course, a country with an incredible matrix, including chaos and crisis, which are cultural generators. Crisis, paradoxically, generates great artists and great moments. I think Mexicans are good at tempting dialogue, confrontations with artists, and this is what I think is different about exhibiting here.

There is also something to be said about the fact that Mexico is always close to Cuba, in which it has similar direct references: cultural, historical, social, all of it. For me, it is like a school. To come to Mexico and do nothing more than walk through the streets you are continually receiving information and translating this information.

In terms of contexts, what do you think of the United States as a regional context? What are your thoughts on the proliferation of arts from Latin America and Mexico in the States?

I don’t think geography offers a different context but is enriched in other ways. Art is speaking a language, a direct, incisive message, and it does depend a bit on the context of culture of the individual who is seeing it, but not necessarily the location. I lived for a short time in New York and honestly it bored me. I think things happening there artistically, in my opinion, seemed too dependent on what the market dictated, which was creating a sense of self censorship instead of making work in which the market was encapsulated.

It has always been a place that could bring the best from other places, including Latin America. But the best of Latin America is happening in Latin America, it’s not happening in the United States or Europe. I think that’s why there’s a delay: when museums first start worrying about starting collections of Latin American art they are still two years behind in comparison to when the explosions in Mexico, Cuba, Colombia. There’s a tremendous tardiness. There’s a text by Gerardo Mosquera, which I love, that talks about the art from Latin America but not “Latin American Art” and this is also something I think is really important, to not have these things defining tags or limitations. 

Well, speaking of these relationships between contexts, people, and places: are you yourself interested in the thoughts or ideas that people project onto your work?

I think that the relationship that one has with the work in the moment is one that offers a relationship as a spectator, not a creator, as one that takes distance and can take someone to a place that they hadn’t even thought of. The work can change the path; it can offer a new route. The public is also so diverse that I think they simply enrich the language of art in a different way than say, criticism can, or any other type of communication. It’s a total adventure, though one that also has certain patrons, and the motives that come with them.

And when you are thinking of a work in a space, do you guide or think of this dialogue that can occur between the piece, the space, and even more specifically, the public?

I don’t necessarily think about the public, but certainly thinking about the space. I think space is another tool for communication. A work needs to live in a real space, which also includes a utopia — such as this exhibition at Kurimanzutto — or there can be others that really need the hierarchy of the white cube, and each one has completely different characteristics. That is to say, I believe the space, the museography, the curation, are also part of the work because they also activate communication.

Some of these tools are also the titles.

Of course, titles are very much tools. I think it is very important, when one constructs an order, that it has levels and each one of these has to be very well conceptualized when it is necessary. You see that you are activating something from a determined element. We ourselves have to move, but there is a compensation of elements that helps you make the idea in the space effective.

Speaking of space and the works, let’s talk a little bit more about the exhibition at Kurimanzutto. There is a very ephemeral piece outside the gallery itself, on the open street, titled Puñado de cobre, níquel y zinc (“a handful of copper, nickel, and zinc,” 2016). This work is almost an invisible gesture with which to open the exhibition and it will slowly become more and more invisible throughout the run of the show.

It will always be there. It will become more and more imperceptible with the soles of shoes walking over it, cars, rain, and it’s something that becomes more and more imperceptible throughout the entire month, and will also be more and more subtle, more lost within the space, but it endures. It really deals with the question of the abstract illusory conscious. The piece is also really made of illegal materials, since it is illegal to destroy money.

It is made with Mexican pesos. The coins have been turned into dust.

Yes, exactly. Yet what should be illegal is the taking this original mineral from its original location in order to convert it into money. That should be illegal. I like this contradiction as social consensus, how we have this concept that is so historically determined that now gives us what we think is a sense of clarity above the consent of its location of origin.

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