Bittersweet Infamy - #116 - A Most Unusual Proposal

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

Josie tells Taylor about the unconventional art project that saw American artist Jill Magid propose to Italian archivist Federica Zanco with a diamond made from the physical remains of prominent Mexican architect Luis Barragán. Plus: head up to Dawson City, Yukon, and join the Sourtoe Cocktail Club—by drinking a cocktail made with a severed human toe!

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at ROM. Tickets at rom.ca. Welcome to Bitter Sweet Infamy. I'm Taylor Basso and I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on in infamy.

The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet. Josie episode 116. You know, we talked a lot in our early days about how we wanted to get to 100, but I really think latently we wanted to get to 116. Yeah, yeah. Like another like sweet 16. Absolutely. And now to celebrate our countries are at economic war with one another. Welcome. That is what happened this weekend. Yeah. Yeah, damn. Come in fast and furious. Like that's as they do in as they do in Trump's

America, right? Well, plus 30 days. Yes. Fast and furious with a 30 day extension. Fast and furious parentheses expect delays. So we were greeted by the news. Donald Trump was implementing 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada and then a little bit less on China. And it was a whole big thing. It was a whole big fucking thing.

I can tell you that every Canadian that I know, like, woke up with hate in their heart for Donald Trump during every day of that period. And then he went to the negotiating table with Canon in Mexico and they gave him shit that they'd already promised to give. And he walked away and acted like it was his victory. And meanwhile, I guess Elon Musk robbed the till. The end. So strange. So weird.

Oh, a flamboyant distraction, maybe a bit of election tampering in other countries, testing the wad. Like, who knows? Who knows what it was? Yeah. But possibly something to do with the fact that, you know, Elon Musk has all this like unprecedented oversight despite not being a member of the government and all these government agencies getting dismantled and so on. It did seem like Mexico at least, like this had happened with the renegotiation of NAFTA with them. And so they were just like, uh-huh, okay, uh-huh, uh-huh. But the conversations with Canada seemed a little bit more like barbed and a little bit like wait what we really wanted you guys to fuck off yes

me too i want us to fuck off too it used to be the case i think when we talked about this podcast and how we were going to sell it sometimes we like kind of fell back on this line of like a canadian and an american who are friends and then eventually we're like, hey, that doesn't, there's not that interesting. Like what, like very diverse, right? Like these are pretty similar cultures. But I think one, now it becomes more relevant. And two, it sort of reminds us that there's like a big button to do with America

that Canadians really don't like getting pushed. Like I've seen a pretty unanimous reaction from across the political spectrum, seemingly on this issue in Canada, that we're all really surly about it. Well, I just should be. That's insane. It's fucking nuts.

With all this tariff business. It's terrific. Wow, terrible, alternatively, but I think yours is a little bit better. this tariff business. It's terrific. Wow. Terrible, alternatively, but I think yours, yours is a little bit better. I just don't agree that it's good. Right. Your pun is better, but the situation is worse.

And I will say I was popcorning around for the minifamous, which is the mini infamous story that we do at the beginning of most episodes to kind of set the scene, get you in the mood to hear more. I was popcorning around a few different ideas, which is the mini infamous story that we do at the beginning of most episodes to kind of set the scene, get you in the mood to hear more. I was popcorning around a few different ideas, but they were all American ideas. And I didn't know if I was gonna get charged

that 25% duty if I brought in an American story. I was financially concerned. And then also I wanted to support local, you know, support Canadian. And so I shopped locally and I brought a made in Canada infamous for y'all. I think you're, support Canadian. Uh huh. And so I shopped locally and I brought a Made in Canada Mnfamous for y'all. I think you're going to enjoy it. Oh, I do.

I already do. If you're in America, that'll be slightly more expensive for you to listen to. Oh, that's the other thing. I will announce my own way of supporting the potential, I guess, like trade war between Canada and America is if these tariffs go through, I am prepared to do non-American stories for the podcast. Ooh. In for a test or until I get bored.

We'll see. Until I find an American one that I really want to do. That you just can't pass up. Yeah. Tell you a little bit about Dawson City in the Yukon territory. Oh, yeah. tell me more! First of all, I want to send a little bit of warm thought to this rough and tumble gold rush town in Canada's sparsely populated Yukon Territory, north of BC.

As of taping, it is currently minus 23 degrees Celsius there. Oh, babies. Hate to be drinking a glass of water outside. It'll freeze and the glass will crack. It'll be terrible. Ugh. With a population of between 15 and 2,500 people, this is the Yukon's second largest metropolis,

believe it or not. Whoa. You won't find a McDonald's or a CV's here, or as they call it in America, a CVS. That'll cost you. Watch out. Yeah, hope we won't look out for those upcharges. But you'll find the cast of colourful locals you'd expect in a resource-boomed town that

still has wooden sidewalks tucked far away from everyone's notice. One of the preeminent local hotels is The downtown, and if you're staying at the downtown, you must pass through the Sourdough Saloon and become part of the Sourdough Club by drinking the saloon's iconic sourdough cocktail. Sourdough? Not dough. Sourdough. It's the sourdough with a D saloon.

It's a sourdough a this little piggy cocktail. Okay. I'm just imagining a pickled toe in alcohol. Yeah. Okay. Just small nods. Yep. The recipe is one ounce minimum of alcohol of any kind. The standard is Yukon Jack whiskey. It's a local product. You know, again, shop local. Yeah. And one dehydrated severed human toe. standard is Yukon Jack Whiskey. It's a local product, you know, again, shop local. Yeah.

And one dehydrated severed human toe. Okay. Okay. I guessed right. Good. Okay. Wow. Not pickled, salted, if you must know. Salted. Yes. Yes. Salt-salt-salt-o-zized. The recipe provided at dawsoncity.ca notes that you should garnish with courage. Oh, this is not a very nice toe. It is blackened, both withered and shockingly large. Oh, it is kept in a jar of salt and revealed with much ceremony by Toe Master Terry Lee, who informs you that in order to become a part

of the Sour Toe Club, record your name in the ledger and receive a certificate suitable for framing, you must consume the beverage in the glass without allowing the Toe into your mouth. He solemnly intones the final rule. In toes. Oh, does he ever! You're a step ahead with that one, Josie. He solemnly intows the final rule.

You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips must touch that gnarly toe. Yeah! So, okay, okay, oh God. Josie, you suck toes. It's been a minute. Would you suck a toe in this context? Would you take the sour toe challenge at the sour dough saloon at

the downtown in Dawson City, Yukon? I have questions like how cold is it outside? How bored am I? Minus 28. Okay. You already saw someone else do the toe too much fanfare and it's yeah, I don't think this bar has a ski ball. You know what I mean? Right, okay, okay. This isn't Dave and Buster's. This is a town of 1,000. We've got a toe that we're all really stoked about. Right, I see, I hear that now.

Or a town of like 2,000, I should say. I imagine that I have had a few drinks before I have gotten to this point in the night. A couple of little sniffers of Yukon Jack whiskey perhaps. I would probably do it. I'd do it, of course you do. You're gonna go to the Toe Bar

and not drink the Toe drink, come on. I'm gonna go to one of the normie bars in fucking Dawson City, then I'll go to the Tilted Kilt next door, come on. Yeah, I'd do it, I'd totally do it. All right, so I'm gonna give you a little bit of the history of this toe, okay? Yeah, whose toe is it? I'm like, yeah, sure, I drink do it. All right, so I'm gonna give you a little bit of the history of this toe, okay? Yeah, whose toe is it?

I'm like, yeah, sure, I drink the toe. That wasn't one of my questions. I was just like, how cold is it? If it's fucking Mother Teresa's dead mummified toe, it's still a dead mummified toe. It's not really- This is true. There's no answer that would really cheer me up, I don't think.

But what if it's like, oh, this was like the town leper. It's like, uh, maybe I won't try. The town leper of Dawson City, Yukon. Population 1499 since the leprosy hit. I don't believe that it came from the town leper. I don't have any records here that any of the toe bearers had leprosy. Okay. The connection to that question is like it is somebody's toe. This was connected to a person who had lived a life.

The toe bone was connected to the foot bone in this case. Yes. It's a real toe. It's a real toe from a real dead body. Okay. Or from a real body, I should say. The original body that it was amputated from a live body. Or from a real body, I should say. The original body that was amputated from a live body. Let's throw it back to the Prohibition era of the 1920s when brothers Louis and Otto Lincoln were running rum via dog sled and Louis stepped through a patch of ice, submerging his foot in freezing cold water. Louis kept a stiff upper lip and an even stiffer foot as he carried on with the delivery.

By the time the brothers Lincoln got back to their cabin, the foot was frozen and the toe had frostbite. Ooh, and was it the baby toe or the? Big toe. Ooh, that'll fuck with your balance. That's not good. Balance is one thing, gangrene is another, and to stave off the spread Otto gave his brother some anesthesia in the form of overproof rum, and he gave that toe the cold kiss of

an axe's blade. The brothers then saved the toe in a jar of alcohol as something of a memento of the evening. So again, that sort of that pickled toe that you were originally imagining. Yes. In 1973, the toe was discovered by Yukon local Captain Dick Stevenson. I don't know if Captain Dick has an actual military rank or if he's just a touch of local color. Either way, he thinks of the downtown sourdough saloon

and decides that to become a true sourdough, you must drink the sour toe. I get that logic. That totally checks out, yeah. When it's put up to you that way, you can't help but understand it, right? It rhymes. It can't be wrong.

Of course, yes. Captain Dick starts going to the downtown and dropping this toe in people's drinks until eventually it takes out, yeah, that's what I would do. Ah! But eventually it takes on a more official status with rules and regulations in our toe master, Terry Lee.

Since 1973, the toe has been served more than 100,000 times to adventurous bar patrons. Whoa. It's become something of an object of local pride. According to one woman who I saw interviewed, I'm on the sour toe cocktail list and so is my mother. And on the same page, so is Pierre Trudeau and Pierre Burton. So one of our famous prime ministers and one of our famous writers.

So it's, you know, not just the citizens of Dawson city, you know, people come from far and wide to join the toe club. There's some famous people there. Yeah, there's some famous people. I know people who've done the toe club and it is legitimately a thing It has not been the same toe since 1973. Oh shit Okay, we've had a few casual toes along the way. You know what I mean? according to the sour toe cocktail club in July 1980 a Minor named Gary younger was trying for the sour toe record on his

13th glass of sour toe champagne his chair tipped over backwards and he swallowed the toe. Sadly toe number one was not recovered. Oh my god he ate cannibal he became a cannibal. He became a cannibal. He started with the toes. That was a night at the bar, you know? Damn. That's quite a story to tell your fucking family when you get home too. Like, guess you ate a toe.

I don't feel so good. I feel like I just ate a whole little piggy. Thankfully, when the toe has encountered adverse toe, we've been able to crowd source more toes from the community up to 27 over the years. Toe number two came from an amputation due to an inoperable corn, maybe makes it somehow less appetizing, which is a thought. Toes five and six were donated by an old Yukon man in exchange for free drinks for his nurses

at the sourdough saloon. And toe eight arrived in a jar of alcohol with the message, don't wear open-toed sandals while mowing the lawn. Oh, wow. Wait, but what are happening to the previous toes? The more you use a toe, you store it, you take it out, you put it in a drink, put it in a drink, put it in alcohol, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. It's toe attrition.

The toes break down. Some of the toes, sometimes people will donate their toe, but the toe won't be large enough, poses a choking hazard. It's because it's got to be a bit of a skookum toe, so you don't swallow the toe like our boy Gary, right? Oh, my God. Of course, over the years, many have tried to make their name by stealing, tampering with, or otherwise destroying

the toe deliberately. In 2017, the toe was stolen while the bartender's back was turned. The guilty party eventually returned it via mail. Perhaps most infamously, on August 24th, 2013, my 22nd birthday, New Orleans man Joshua Clark deliberately swallowed the sour toe. Josh, what you doing? And I like Josh here because he's a little bit of a microcosm for maybe some of the ongoing tensions between Canada and America in the present tense as we discuss these tariffs.

Joshua Clark, at least as of 2013, was a dude with a long mullet, a big dog, a big jacked up truck. He was described in this documentary that I watched as a walking American flag. So he just rolls into Dawson city like, oh, it's a down toe club, woo hoo! You know what I mean? Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew! I was doing hand guns there and they do go pew, pew. Eagle screeches, but really it's just red tail hawks.

Really just red tail hawk the whole time. Joshua Clark, he's a guy who, one year he was riding a bull at a rodeo in Wyoming on the 4th of July. He ripped his bicep in half in true American style. He decided that he wanted to do something just that crazy every summer, maybe with a little bit less like muscle trauma one hopes. This particular summer 2013, he was in Dawson City driving up to Alaska with his dog. 2013, he was in Dawson City driving up to Alaska with his dog.

Prior to this trip up the coast, he had read some book and he heard the story of the guy swallowing the toe and the tone of it seemed almost celebratory. Like people like, whoa, I can't believe this guy swallowed the toe. He's a legend. He's crazy. Right. Yeah, yeah. This guy, Joshua Clark, is like reading this book and he's like, man say what you want about me But I draw the line at cannibalism and then he thought why do I draw the line at cannibalism? Lines are meant to be erased and redrawn really if you're drawing with a stick into the sand you just smooth that baby right over Cross this line Exactly the lines are meant to be hopped over so you can see Joshua and his mullet on video necking the toe and slapping the $500 fine down on the tape

I wanted to yak because you like I got a bad gag reflex and you start thinking about the logistics This is a skookum toe. Oh Shit, you'd want to chew on that thing once or twice, but you couldn't. Oh, no. And in the video, he expects a delighted reception. And to some degree, he gets one, because people are just so shocked that when some guy eats a human toe

and starts high-fiving you, you're like, fuck, fuck, fuck yeah, sure. I guess. Woo. You know what I mean? Like, okay. What a beautiful microcosm of American politics. Yes, yes.

And you can also see that Terry the Toe Guy is choked. Like, he's like, wow, he really did it. He really ate the toe. $500 fine? What's this guy doing? Every summer he takes a big trip and he drops 500 bucks at the bar? That's insane. More than 500, I mean, he's probably got some money.

Supposedly a minor mob formed to extract justice in the form of 10 new toes, but Clark skipped town the next morning. Oh. This deliberate digital destruction rocked the Dawson City community, and specifically, it rocked Toe Master Terry Lee, a man who has poured his identity into being the Toe Master.

Quote, I have an emotional connection to this thing because it's the toe. The toe gobbling incident went viral. Totally. Totally generating huge publicity, publicity toe. And the bar had a backup ready to go. Totally. Totally. Generating huge publicity, publicito. And the bar had a backup ready to go. So in terms of like, we don't lose, they usually have one or two toes on the go, but it's good that we have many because that we don't wear out our toes, right?

Yes. That's why we have 10. Yeah. Exactly. Keep those tootsies tender. Even in spite of the fact that it was maybe like a net gain for like attention to the toe club. Yeah.

Terry vowed never to forgive Joshua Clark under any circumstances. Quote, all the things we built up here, he just spat on them as far as I'm concerned. He swallowed them right down. He swallowed them whole. The toe destruction fine was raised to $2,500. Oh, yes.

Just in case, we raised those tariffs by like 500%. Toe Riffs, hey. Toe Riff. That's the Toe Police coming for me. That one was a step too far, ha-ho. That's terrific. So Joshua Clark, or as Terry the Toe Guy called him, the cannibal.

Ugh, it truly. Truly was issued a lifetime ban from the downtown. That's only fair. That is only fair. Well, it's only fair, Josie, if you're the type of person who holds a grudge. You see, in 2017, the CBC released a 17 minute long documentary, Sourdough, the story of the story

cannibal, chronicling Joshua Clark's saga of attempting to make amends with the people of Dawson City and get his lifetime ban from the downtown revoked. This guy has way too much time on his hands, damn. One of the people I saw to me was like, he did not get enough attention as a child. We see Joshua Clark amend his living will to bequeath his two large toes to the downtown. Though this is apparently a very popular request locally. Like when he's on the phone about it, they're like, oh yeah, people do that all the time. Yeah, whatever.

Yeah. Classic. Talk is cheap. Toes are where the currency is. Put your feet where your mouth is, right? The mortician apparently won't do this. It's not regulation. So Joshua settles for buying a pair of gardening shears from a hardware store. We don't get any on-camera amputations. This is thankfully like kind of left for us to imagine that when he's like a dying old man, they might do this or I don't know what the logistics are.

Either way, he returns to the downtown with an apology in the form of a long poem and his updated living will, which is framed and put on display in the bar. Joshua Clark's lifetime ban is revoked and he is forgiven by the community of Dawson City with one notable exception. Terry Lee, the toe guy. Terry Lee, the toe guy, still refuses to make amends. Stand strong. Stand strong, Terry Lee.

Even if you only got nine toes to stand on. Sometimes that makes you stand even stronger. Yeah, you have to put a lot of intentionality into it for sure. When someone off camera asks toe master Terry, wouldn't it be easier to forgive Terry? Terry replies no not him ever Yeah, as one local interview subject for the documentary sadly puts it one guy swallows a dude's toe another guy hates him forever Succinct I like that. Yeah Either way the sour toe Club is alive and well

with many new donors sending Terry their digits to put on salt. And if you're not lucky, haunt your tongue. Oh, Josie, if you and I are ever passing through Dawson city, we must remember to bring the $5 toe tax, belly up to the bar

and record our names forever in infamy. And of course, we must also remember to double up on warm socks. Frostbites a bitch." Oh! Yeah, I think that the lesson here was that the toe was symbolic and in his haste to be a cool guy who does something outrageous and gets a lot of attention, I think that maybe Joshua Clark, like, failed to realize that he was not exhibiting empathy for this toe-obsessed man in this toe-obsessed town.

Right. I will say for his own part, he seemed in the documentary to really admire Dawson C. D. Neitz people and be, like, quite sad that his lack of empathy had, like, put him in bad standing with this community. So maybe he learned a lesson. Yeah, and that's a good lesson to learn. With that said, his way of remedying that was to come back and publicly read a poem and donate a little prop,

so I get also why Terry the Toe Guy was like, this was just another PR piece for Josh the Mullet Guy. Yeah, that's true, that's very true. Now there's more cameras, great. I'm wondering how legally they can have so many human body parts on the premise. I don't think they're checking up on Dawson city. Fair enough.

There was one guy who donated his toe and then he came and did a shot with his own toe. That's kind of cool. That's pretty hip. That feels like a ceremony. Not hip. Toe. Toe. ["Sweet Home Alone"] So. ["Table Read"]

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Listen and subscribe to Table Read today on Apple Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts. Who's ready to level up their mental fitness and win the seconds of the day? Well, at least that's my goal. Join me, Mark Champagne, on Behind a Human, a podcast where I dive into the stories and practices of extraordinary individuals. From billionaires to Olympians and cultural icons like Tony Hawk, each episode unveils the pathways and the mental fitness strategies that propel them to the top. Now available on all major podcast platforms, here's Thriving Minds. Hey, sweethearts.

Taylor here. Visit our Ko-fi account at ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy. That's K-O-Hyphen-F-I dot com slash bittersweetinfamy. Become a monthly subscriber to join the Bittersweet Film Club. Not only do you get to hear me, Josie, and Mitchell analyze infamous films, but you get to tell us which movies to watch. This month, at the command of our subscribers, Dylan and Satchel, we've suited up for a space odyssey in the form of the 2000 L. Ron Hubbard adaptation, Battlefielder, starring John Travolta, Forrest Whitaker,

a sea of beautiful interchangeable long-haired white men and a single featureless woman. I'll blow up your girlfriend with a collar and he's like, no, she's the only one who I fuck. I think there's no one else. Yeah. We know nothing else about her. We know nothing about her. If she dies, I'll have to settle for one of the like many beautiful long-haired men that I surround with, twinks that I surround myself with all the fucking time.

Who look just like me. Who look exactly like me, but I'm noticeably like a degree hotter than them because I'm the main one. Join the Film Club now with your monthly pledge over at ko-fi.com slash bittersweetin4me, and we'll see you at the movies. your sweet infamy, and we'll see you at the movies. Speaking of interesting uses of the human body, Taylor, have you ever heard of somebody taking either their own, bequeathing their own cremated remains, or taking perhaps a loved one's cremated remains, and having those remains compressed

at such a high pressure that it creates a diamond. Yes. Yeah. Why not? My sister-in-law, Nicole, always jokes that she will have my brother's remains turned into a diamond that will be installed in her front tooth. That's cool.

Which I'm like, wow, you really just You care. You guys really love each other. Yeah, you really care. It's a big commitment. Yeah. This song has been intriguing, like hearing Nicole's plans for my brother's partum. I'm sure Alice loves that gag. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But a few years back, I went to a local art museum, the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, also called CAM. We have a kind of a museum district and it's this little very stylized, crazy metal architecture building. It's pretty small, but it's a nice little free museum that you can go see works. And Mitchell and I were there a few years ago and I saw this exhibit called

The Proposal. And it involved taking someone's remains and creating them into a diamond. Which I was like, oh, okay, so that's a thing thing. That's not just something Nicole jokes about like that's a thing thing. But the proposal, the exhibit is not just someone's remains turned into a diamond to love and cherish. It is the remains of Mexico's foremost and most iconic architect that this artist took a portion of his remains with his family's permission, with his family's permission, had them created into a single two-carat diamond, which then she had set as a solitaire diamond, as if in an engagement ring, and she presented it to the woman who lives in Switzerland and presides with a very hawkish intention over his archive. So this artist presents the diamond,

presents the ring to her saying, you won't let go of this artist. It's almost as if you are married to him. What if I propose to you with a diamond made of his dead body? Yes, in exchange for his body of work, I give you the diamond of his body. Much to consider, much to consider.

Much to consider, much to consider, it's true. I have many little artistic instincts in there. Okay, interesting, sure. And this famous architect, you're going to Mexico soon. I am, I'm delighted. I'm gonna be trying to bring back a little bit of something content wise for y'all. Ooh, ooh, ooh.

Well, I'm supplying you with a little bit of content wise right now that you can take. I'll take that. With you, especially because he has some public sculptures and there are some museum, private residence type museum stuff in Mexico City. So you'll be in that area. Have you heard of this architect Luis Baragán? No. I read multiple places for American audience.

He's like the Frank Lloyd Wright of Mexican architecture. Right, right. With a W. Right. But he's not just well, like Frank Lloyd Wright, he's not just well known in Mexico. He's like a worldwide known architect when you know architects, right? Right. He was born in 1902 to a wealthy and conservative family in Guadalajara, Mexico. He grew up between Guadalajara

and a ranch that his family owned. That was about 30 miles outside of the city. And he was a big equestrian. He loved riding horses on this ranchero that he grew up on. But don't think like Vaquero cowboy vibe. Think like tennis whites. That was the like polo. Yes. The horsey said the horses, their tails are braided, that kind of shit, you know, dressage dressage a little bit. Yes. And even as a young boy, he was pretty precocious and had this artistic eye for things. In fact, he told

journalists that as a schoolboy while he was out writing, he would notice, quote, the play of shadows on the walls, how the afternoon sun gradually got weaker, although it was still light. And how the look of things changed, ankles got smaller and straight lines stood out even more. We get it. You're an artist. Yeah, it's like plastic flag floating in the wind, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very that. So interestingly enough, with that foundation, he started out studying engineering, which is like, why are you doing that, my dear sir?

You're talking about, you know, the dappled light of the dying afternoon shadows, you ride your, yeah, your Polo horse. Yeah, yeah. So upon his graduation, he travels to Europe and he begins to build an appreciation away from engineering and towards architecture itself, which probably is fulfilling a lot more of that artistic leaning side of him. He comes back to Mexico and he's like, this is what I want to do. I'm going to try and do this. His first few buildings in Guadalajara are still pretty unexciting. Let's say that they're very recognizable for that time and era. And I think it should be noted the time

is about the 1920s in Mexico, which is exactly when like artists and intellectuals are trying to search for a national identity. This is the era of Frida Kahlo. This is the era of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco. Like these are, you know, this is when Mexican arts in particular gets really cooking. And Varraigan goes back to Europe for another trip. And it's at this point when he starts to understand not just that he likes architecture, but that he really wants to play with it and mold it and become an artist in his practice of architecture. So he meets and goes to lectures of some famous contemporary modernist architects, including a landscape architect named Ferdinand Bach. And he's very

inspired by the work that this guy does because it includes the plant life. And in central Mexico where the climate is so temperate, that's something that he can easily play with in his buildings that he creates. And so he comes back to Mexico, back to Guadalajara, and he realizes Guadalajara is not the place for him. He moves to Mexico City, and this is in 1936, and he's there until his death in the late 80s. So Mexico City becomes like, that's his stronghold. Mexico City is a growing metropolis. You know, it's one of the biggest cities in the world, but at this time it was still like getting bigger, getting weirder. You know, art was being developed more and more.

Yes. Yes. So he starts doing some commissioned work that's specifically for homes. some commissioned work that's specifically for homes. One of his early famous ones is called this Folk, Eggerstrom House and Stables. And it's this brightly colored sculptural sequence of horse pools. Like a pool for a horse? Like a pool for a horse. Not billiards for a horse now. Not billiards for a horse. No. Pools for horses. Because it's between this like big, vibrant, brilliantly colored home and this vibrant, brilliantly covered stables. And so he's playing with the indoors and outdoors, and he loves

the landscape architecture aspect of it. So he's like he's using indoors and outdoors and outdoors and in. He's kind of going all over the place. Sure. His style is very interesting because he works mainly in residential. He does some sculptural stuff that's more public, but mainly it's homes. They're always look kind of anonymous from the outside. They're just like cement at walls, like, oh, what could be happening in there? But once you walk inside, then the house or the residence kind of opens up to you. And it's all

these lavish, really big cathedral-like ceiling interiors and the light and- Big things in small packages, kind of. Yes. Yeah. And they're often, because of the way that that design works, they're often kind of hidden. Like if you're on the street, you wouldn't see one of his houses and be like, It's not Gaudi. It's not Gaudi, right.

You have to like move through the architecture to really understand it and get the whole picture of it. He's also really interested in like using really bright colors and natural materials. He really likes lava stone, which he can easily get in central Mexico. He loves like exposed and lightly treated woods. He does a lot of things that are specific to Mexico. But I think what's interesting is that at this time,

a lot of the arts are hand in hand in Mexico with socialism or even communism. Like Frida Kahlo is like a staunch communist. You know, she has a love affair with Trotsky. You would know that as his former wife. It's true, yes. In that play that I acted in in 2007, eight? 2008, I was also in that play in 2008, hey?

You were a monkey. I was a monkey typing Hamlet. It was a production of short plays from David Ives, all in the timing, if you must know. Don't make me sing. Don't make me recite my monologue. Don't make me sing and dance. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

So this time, which we know from our days with David Ives, communism, socialism are very big parts of the Mexican artistic identity. But Baragon is perhaps... He's the horsey set. He's the horsey set, yeah. He says, why do we need to rock the boat? We love the upper class, am I right guys? Exactly. When someone accused him of quote, only designing homes for rich people, he allegedly replied and horses, rich people and horses. That's very funny. I know, which is like lean in my brother.

This is great. Hey, some of those rich people have servants that live with them. Yes. Yeah. So he was this tall guy. He was blue eyed, kind of fair skinned. He was bald from a very young age. Okay.

This is from an article in the New Yorker by Alice Gregory. She writes, he wore English sports jackets, silk shirts and knitted ties. He had a Cadillac and employed a chauffeur. He enjoyed melon halves drizzled with sherry and was known to have his maid prepare entirely pink meals. An architect friend recalled being disinvited to tea on several occasions because the light in the garden wasn't right. Okay, so he's a gay elitist with OCD is what I'm getting. Got it. Knit ties. That's pretty cool. This writer, Alice Gregory, also says of him, Baragon lived beautifully and tyrannically.

I want to be a wealthy artist. I know, right? The shadows in the afternoon. The Sherry. The Sherry. In the afternoon. Yeah. The Sherry. So interesting that you immediately pick up on the fact that you thought he was gay. He never married, but he did, at least in the public understanding of him, had girlfriends, which he could have been interested in men and women.

We don't know. That's true. Yeah, we don't know. There's a lot of different things here, but he did say that he liked particular women. He liked willowy and dark women. Hairy, six foot tall, big dick. Yeah.

He supposedly liked the way that some women could seem so fragile. I mean, he seems a bit fragile, I would argue. I know, right? Yeah, yeah, it's not an opposite attract situation. He just wants someone who won't clash with the drapes. Yeah, I think that might be it. Yeah.

So yeah, he's obviously very eccentric. He designs all these different buildings and residences within Mexico. The one that he did not make or is credited as having designed was actually in San Diego in California. Go Pods. Go Pods for the Salk Institute. They play at the Salk Institute?

Yes, yes, yes. Formerly Petco Park, now Salk Institute. Designed by Baragon, yeah. So Louis Kahn is the architect who designed this research facility that is on a cliff that overlooks the Pacific. It's gorgeous. And he invited Baragon to come and do the landscape design in this courtyard that runs between the research labs and kind of spills out into this beautiful view of the Pacific. And Baragon went, he saw it, and he said, you're going to hate me, but there should be no trees here.

And what he actually recommended is keep all of this concrete and just create one long fountain that moves down the space towards the Pacific. And the space is really, really cool because the exposed concrete, you know, where you can like see the timber lines in it, like how they've set the cement. Sure. It's all of that style. And it's just this, you know, it would seem kind of maybe Soviet in style or like prison-like, but because it opens into the Pacific, all your energy kind of gets like pulled and gets fed

into this huge blue ocean that's ahead of you. Cool. Which is also kind of a funny thing that Baragán did. And also another, you know, another sign of how eccentric he is. It's like this could have been a major commission for him. And he was just like, no, the cement is telling me don't do this. You know, like, he didn't say that exactly. I would suggest. It's the jest, exactly.

So another interesting project that Barragan did was in 1945, he bought a large plot of land in the Southern part of Mexico City. And it was at that time on the outskirts. And now it's like, you know, the central. Yeah, I was guessing that's probably pretty close to the middle. I'm sure. Yeah.

It was a development that he made called El Peregral and it was in the lava flows. Previously, this area hadn't been built on because you would have to like try and take out all the, all this. The lava. Yeah. All the lava, which is pretty hard pretty impossible yeah but what varagon wanted to do was to build small homes like kind of a gated community style that had you know light and gardens and lava and lava he would keep and he

did keep all of the lava so that you would move through the channels of lava as if it were like valleys and gardens. Cool. And that's how you would separate it all. It sounds very cool. Very cool. Sounds like a Pokemon town or something. Very into that.

Yes. It has that vibe. Yeah. And architecturally, it's regarded as a triumph. Financially, commercially, an absolute goddamn flop. Isn't that how it goes? Yeah. That's how he ruled. He was an artist.

He said, life deprived of beauty is not worthy of being called human. You know? Fuck yeah. So true. He was also deeply religious. He was Catholic. And he was commissioned to build a convent

on a suburban fringe of Mexico City, Tlalpan. And it's this very kind of unassuming convent from the street. And then you go in and it has this like very expertly arranged glass, like yellow and orange glass that catches the light. And you go down the, you know, in a church or chapel, the main walkway goes straight to the cross. But what he's actually done is moved the cross to the side. So the sun coming through the window casts a shadow so that the cross at a certain time of day is in the center of the room. Takes up the room basically.

Yeah. It takes it's over the entire chapel. Yeah. That I imagine would be very like, that's a big lowercase T, baby. Yeah. That would be very impactful, very, even for a non-religious person, I'm sure very visually striking arrangement

of light and shadow play, but as a religious person, I would imagine like very moving. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and you're kind of washed in this yellow light. Like it's very cool. The glow of Christ. Another piece that he did, and this was one of his more public facing pieces, is called the Torre Satellite. And it is a cluster of brightly colored towers that are pretty much on this median of a Mexico City highway.

And their primary colors, red, blue, white and yellow, but they're designed specifically so that they can be viewed and enjoyed from a moving car. Interesting. Yeah, he understood that this part of town, a Mexico City in general, is like it's known for its traffic, right?

Even at that time. Yes, having been in that Mexico City traffic, that's not untrue. And he wanted it to be something that when you're sitting in traffic, you could still kind of enjoy. So you see the colors kind of pass by you at different speeds at different times of the day.

It looks really cool. And that one is like right in the middle of the highway. So that one might be pretty easy to see because the more private residences are harder to get into. But there is one residence that is open to the public because it is a museum and it is the home that he built for himself and where he had his studio on Calle Francisco Ramirez in Mexico City. And it was originally supposed to be built for somebody else, but that fell through and he loved it so much that he moved in. The house was built in 1948.

And then in the fifties, he moved in and he used it as kind of an experimenting ground, like a laboratory almost. He would kind of try things out and try this light here, take out this, put in this. And so the house over time, you could almost think of it as like becoming perfected. Like he was like really working it over and trying to get it exactly the way he wanted it. And he stayed there until his death in 1988. And it's the same idea of his other stuff.

We're from the outside, it just looks like a cement building, no big deal. And then you enter and it's this very small, like low ceiling entryway. And then you walk up a flight of lava rock stairs. And then all of a sudden you're in this living room and library that looks out onto this beautiful garden. And it's like high ceiling,

full windows, absolutely gorgeous. Like the way that the light comes in and other rooms have like bright pink walls. There's a very famous like floating staircase. Nope. Taylor says no. No, no, floating staircase AKA enjoy breaking your neck when you have two glasses of wine one night. That's what I call that. But otherwise, sounds like a great house. Yeah. Do you want to see some of these designs?

Yeah, please. By all means. Oh, cool. Yeah, they're very like bright colors. I love that. I love bright colors. I don't trust people who don't paint with bright colors. And it does something really lovely. As a matter of fact, in my old home in Syria, I had a bright orange room and it did lovely things

with the glow of the evening sun, much as some of Baragon's designs do. A lot of like really clean shapes, like blocky shapes, big windows, dappled light, almost kind of industrial shapes. Yeah, he loves a cube, which feels very industrial. Who doesn't? It's true.

It's true. As you point out, the foremost architect of Mexico, Octavio Paz, who's a Mexican writer, Pulitzer Prize winner, he wrote some about Barragán and his style, in particular how it relates to Mexico. And Octavio Paz says, quote, Baragon's architecture is rooted in the Mexican village with its streets limited by towering walls that in turn lead to plazas and fountains. The art of Baragon is an example of how to employ our popular tradition with intelligence.

And he points out that Baragán's style is kind of this amalgamation of like, of course, the Spanish conquerors who came before, but also how the Spanish conquerors were influenced by Mediterranean styles and Moorish styles, Islamic styles from even before Spain with Spain. Yeah. And Paz is making the argument that like this, like long reach of history and an understanding of like current day Mexican materials in terms of like using the lava rock and the wood and the colors that are employed,

it creates this like extremely Mexican identity. It looks very Mexican. Yeah, in the same way that like Frida Kahlo, her work kind of began to identify Mexicanidad, you know, and Diego Rivera, and this kind of like other contemporaries of Aragon's. But of course this is in the architectural sense and architecture is like the art that we live in, right?

So it has even more of a, like an intangible, intangible vibe to it. I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're right. It's, it's the art that we live in. So in 1980, our boy, Baragon is awarded the Pritzker Prize, which is considered like the Nobel of architecture. And it's the profession's highest honor. It comes with the recognition of, you know, the highest honor, but also $100,000 US. But do you get a frame certificate like you do in the toe club? You get a bronze medallion.

That's actually much better, yeah. Yeah. Terri, I'm sorry. Please forgive me someday. Terri Lee. On your deathbed, please forgive me for disparaging the toe. You can only make amends by offering your toe. Even then. So this is, you know, like the culmination of his work and the recognition that he's

so deserving of. And he's very sweet. He gives this very poetic acceptance speech where he's not just like, thank you, thank you, thank you. No, he's talking about the dappled sunlight coming through the leaves. Of course. Yes. Yes.

And he talks about like, quote, my architecture is autobiographical, autobiographical, underlying all that I have achieved such as it is. I shared the memories of my father's ranch where I spent my childhood and adolescence. In my work, I have always strived to adapt to the needs of modern living, the magic of those remote nostalgic years." And he goes on about the village and the whitewashed walls and the patios and orchards.

Yep, I saw an old lady putting out the wash on the line and yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's just like, oh, this guy hasn't changed in, in his entire life. That's great. Yeah. Some people just kind of become the final version of themselves. Yeah.

Yeah. And not to say too, that he didn't thank people that he knew and loved and supported him towards the end of his career. He teamed up with a business partner, another architect, Raul Ferreira. And so he thanks him profusely and you know, like it's, it is a beautiful acceptance speech, but it definitely is like, you know, the sherry on the halves of melon kind of vibes.

Yes, it must be nice to live so sweetly. You know what I mean? Like I do think that there is like fundamentally a softness of spirit of that type, which you can find in people of any stripe. But I also think that it is something that you maybe find more often with the people who have the luxury to stop and sniff the flowers. Yeah. And I mean, not to say that they don't work

to stop and sniff the flowers, but they are given the path to do so. They're given the horse to ride and house and put in the brightly colored pool as needed. So in 1988, Baragon has Parkinson's and he succumbs to symptoms and passes away. RIP. He is never married. A confirmed bachelor. Confirmed bachelor. And so according to the instructions of his will, his estate is split into two. One half of it goes to a dear friend, Ignacio Diaz Morales, who is also an architect, but

is much more kind of like family and friend vibe than a business partner say. And Ignacio goes on to create a foundation in Mexico City to like house and you know keep the architect, sorry, keep the archive. It's called Fundación de Arquitectura Tapetia Luis Baragán. This half of the estate we can consider like his personal archive, Baragán's personal archive. It's everything that he owned. The home, on Calle Ramirez, and his books, his collection of art, you know, his records, everything that was in his kitchen, you know, all the personal things. It's relatively small, but it does include Casa Baragon, which is like, you know, the exemplary example of this man's life work.

And UNESCO World Heritage agrees because in 2004 it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Grant. Yeah. It's open as a museum. It's by appointment only, but small numbers of people can go in at a time and like walk through the entire house. Interesting.

Maybe I'll have to check it out if I've got the time while I'm in town. Yeah, there's all this like Catholic iconography and like- The best, I'm sure. The bed that he slept in was like this very simple twin wooden bed frame, you know, like very monastic. Well, I mean, he also didn't have like a longterm partner that we know of, right? That's true. Not like you had to share a bed.

And according to the Casa Veragon website, Casa Veragon is the only individual property in Latin America to have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Frida's gotta be pissed about that from beyond the grave. I know, Casa Azul. Yeah. That's true. She know, Casa Azul. Yeah. That's true.

She's gotta be choked. But usually they're for like, you know, like Montalban or like an architectural site would be considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site, you know, like something bigger and ancient, but this is like a house built in 1948, which is a lot. But a house built, you know what I mean? Not just like a house where someone famous happened to live,

but like a house where like a famous architect tinkered with it to make it the ultimate example of his own work. Yeah, yeah. And it was his studio too. Yeah, exactly. So he like, he was a very private person. I don't think he left the house a lot.

Like his biz, you know, like- Hear, hear brother. Everybody would come to him to do- That's the way to live right there. I know. I agree. Do you want to come over? You can only come over at four fifteen because that's when the light is nice. Otherwise, get out. Actually, at four twelve, you send a message. Sorry. No, no. A cloud. There's a cloud. We can't do it. Slightly overcast. We're going to need to reschedule. So that's one half of the estate. The other half is considered his professional archive. So it is all his documents and drawings, designs, sketches, mockups.

Concepts. Models. Yeah. And it's all of his rights to these two, all the copyright to it as well. So it's all like the legal portion of it, right? Sure, sure. And this, it was all meticulously archived and stored in his home studio. And it's bequeathed to his business partner, Raul Ferreira. Raul, very sweet, talented architect. Five years after Baragon dies, he dies as well. In fact, trigger warning, he

hangs himself. Damn. Yeah. So I think the loss of Badagon was kind of a big thing for him. So Badagon's professional archive after Raul passes away, it is all bequeathed and willed to Raul's wife Rosaria Oranga. And she's also, she knew Baragon, she's a friend as well. And she's from, of course, she's, you know, familiar with it all. But she has this ginormous archive now in her possession. And she is like, I need somebody to buy this. Somebody needs to buy this. I can't. Yeah. I can't do this. This is too much. I'm just one woman. I'm just one woman.

And she knows, too, that Baragon is like this big, famous, award-winning architect. She could not find a buyer in Mexico, though. OK. So she finds a gallery owner in New York who seems interested and he kind of knows maybe some potential prospective buyers and she sells it to him on commission. So the idea is that like Max ProTech is this gallerist's name in New York. He's buying it so that he could sell it.

And she says that when she sold it, everybody was very upset with her because they were like, that's Mexican identity. You can't sell that out of Mexico. Like when the Americans bought Tim Hortons in the Bay, I got you. Yeah, exactly. But of course, it was too late. She had already sold it. The archive arrives in New York and it is so big. Pro-Tech, the gallerist, is worried about the floor of his New York studio.

He's worried that the weight of the archive, which weighs about a thousand kilos, is going to make the floor give out. He says, I called everyone I could get ahold of. We scattered them, meaning the boxes of the archive. We scattered them around the gallery until he could call in an engineer. Brutal. Super brutal.

It is a ginormous archive and we'll get into everything that's in it. But ProTech had a potential buyer that he knew out of Switzerland. And so shortly after he secures the floor of his studio, this young couple arrives. She is an Italian architectural historian. She has her PhD in architectural history. And they've just come from Mexico and they've just seen Casa de Aragon.

And she is absolutely smitten. She's just like, I need all of it. Yes. She says we're buying his entire archive, darling. Her fiancee, Rolf Fälbong, he is the head of Vitra, which is a furniture company in Switzerland that was founded by his parents. And Vitra is like the design of the design of the design of furniture. It's like any fancy... Egg chairs, baby. Egg chairs that hang from your ceiling.

Yeah. And they're carved out of mahogany. Yes, yes. That is Vitra. And so he says, sure, let's get it. This will be a good investment. This will be a good gift that I can give to you. Now the story goes that he proposed to her, he had proposed to her, and in lieu of an engagement ring, Federica said, I want Baragon's archive. That's much better.

Yeah, if you're an architectural historian. Plus later on, you get your ring and it's made of Baragon. Win-win. Well, yeah. This takes a few years from the time of Baragon's passing until the final purchase of the archive, but it's April 1995. This is what arrives in Switzerland to the Vitra headquarters to be archived.

13,500 drawings, 7,500 photographic prints, 82 photographic panels, 3,500 negatives, 7,800 transparencies and slides, 290 publications concerning Batagon's work, 450 publications collected by Batagon not related to his work, clippings from newspapers and magazines documenting Batagon's work, 450 publications collected by Badagon not related to his work, clippings from newspapers and magazines documenting Badagon's work, seven models,

varied manuscripts, notes, lists, correspondence, and... A partridge in a pear tree. Yeah. And then later they acquire the collection of photographs, negatives and transparencies that were made by the photographer Armando Salas Portugal, who was like, Baragon had like two photographers that he worked with and this was one of them. So they get all those negative, all every single photograph and all of its descendants.

Well preserved archive this is. Yeah, he was this very eccentric guy who loved stuff, right? Obviously. This is what you can do when you stay single folks. Yeah, yeah, I know. Also when you have a lot of money. There's that too.

Yeah. Well, and Federica's a, you know, if you get married, then you can inherit all of this. You can get gifted all this shit. That's true. So now enters our next character, Federica Zanco. She is gifted this meticulous archive. She is Italian. She's from Venice, but she met her husband at an opening that Vitra, this big design furniture design house in Switzerland had,

and she fell in love with him and got married. What a net. Rubbing those elbows at the cocktail party. Moved to Switzerland. I know. The Swiss mess. We love to see it. She is in her 30s when she gets the archive. That was in 1995. She calls it 1990 Kaive, because that's when she got the Kaive. Yeah, yeah. That's when the Kaive came to her. She has general rich white lady vibes.

She wears like silk scarves. She has slightly thinning hair, designer prescription glasses, you know. Jesus. Don't have to drag her on the slightly thinning hair, but go off. Well, I'm just saying. I'm just saying put in a bump it.

Federica. Was that in the archive? Did that, did you get that too? Oh no, no. So in order to administer the archive, Federica founds a not for profit organization that she calls Baragon Foundation. Barf, for short.

Barf for short. Baragon and Baragon Foundation, and I'll say it as Baragon because there's no accent on the final A, which is how it's properly spelled. I would say properly spelled. So it's kind of like a bargain bargain in its way. In its own way. Yeah. I've heard rationales around it as like it's the more international spelling or whatever, but I will say if it was a foundation in this guy's name, I would put the diacritic on it.

But in general, I've noticed that a lot of people with kind of Hispanic last names that have accents and diacritics tend to omit those or have those omitted when we're talking, like dealing with English speaking in international communities. So I don't think it's just unique to these folks, but you know. Yeah, that's true. But I think it is important in this case

because one of the early things that the foundation does is they trademark Vatican's name, but they trademark it without the accent. What kind of fuckery is this, Josie? What are you? What are they doing here? What tax form does this let them fill out? Like, what's that about? Exactly. It's that's my thoughts. Exactly. That's my thoughts exactly. So what ends up happening is that Federica has this very tight hold on the archive. Interesting.

She has this very hawkish hold on anything that is related to Veragon's work. And part of that is that she has this huge archive, so she can control who has access to it. And many people have made requests to gain access to come and study it, to look at it, which is not uncommon in terms of archives. Nope. You can imagine many universities would be interested, many art and design schools would be interested. Yeah. Anything Mexico would be interested, many art and design schools would be interested.

Yeah. Anything Mexico would be interested. Yeah. And they would say we would love to, you know, if you could send us photographs or send us, you know, items. Send us some of the lesser slides and we'll make some sort of copy of that displayable in our museum while we study the real thing privately. Yeah. And that's a good point to the museum angle because for a long time, this man named Juan Palomar, he ran the Casa Paragon Museum that is in Mexico City.

And he said, at first we thought marvelous. Instead of having the archives sold by the piece, we have it with a responsible woman, a scholar, a friend. So the idea is that like the archive is all together and that's what's important. And this woman is invested in it. And so we're going to have this beautiful relationship of, you know, we can trade things back and forth. We have an archive, she has an archive. And then she said no no, 25% tariffs.

Exactly, baby. Is that what happened? The people who run the museum in Mexico, they would often refer, you know, people would ask, can we see this? Can we see that? And they said, we don't have that. And they would refer them to Federica.

And the Mexico museum would say like, would you mind telling us what her response is? And these architects, students, historians, museums have interested public, they would all come back and say, she said no, she said no, she said no, she said no. And it was funny because the museum claimed they were amassing another archive of Federica's nose. She always had some excuse. Dr. No, damn. The main excuse was that the Baragon Foundation was preparing a catalog to display and chronicle

the entirety of their archive. It seems large enough to justify a catalog. Yes, yes, totally. But they kept saying we're busy working on that. We're busy working on that. That's where our resources are going. So we can't allow you to see it. But that took 20 years. It was 20 years of saying we're busy on a catalog. You can't come see it. We're busy on a catalog. We couldn't, we couldn't dare send you anything. They were just really busy on the catalog. Yeah. Federica did write a book.

She called it The Quiet Revolution, and it featured writings about Pentagon and some photographs. And it's still quite small, though, compared to what is actually available. And I went to go and see if I could get this book. Like I went on Amazon and in order to access it, it costs like $250. I'm sure she set that price and for $250 she'll send you anything that says no. Yeah. So it's just kind of this very bureaucratic kind of Kafka-esque series of... Don't hurt yourself.

Oh series of trying to get access. Yeah. Yeah. To Zonko's archive. We can call it Federica's archive at this point. Yeah. In fact, one researcher who had made a request to see the archive was asked by Federica for a list of exactly which documents he wished to study, which was impossible for him to procure because there is no public inventory available.

So she's like, I need more details of what she wants. And he's like, that's what I'm asking for. Yeah. I don't know what's in your library, ma'am. You should tell me. So Federica, she has this very intense stronghold that is guarded by lawyers and copyright law and all this, you know, very intense stuff, but it's guarded so closely that, for example, she has rights, the Berdegon Foundation has rights to a certain photographer's photos of Baragán's work. But if anybody uses a photo of Baragán's, her lawyers will send them a letter saying,

have you requested these photographs? Because we own the work. We don't own that photographer's work, but we own Baragán's work. And it's just essentially like, it's the equivalent of if you want to find out if this is legal, you're going to have to pay us a lot of money and pay your own lawyers a lot of money to figure out if what we are requesting is legal.

We have the law, the copyright law, and we have money on our side. It sort of reminds me a little bit of back in episode 37, we talked about what happened when a new like kind of lawyer who was kind of similarly hawkish slash maybe a little bit exploitative took over the American author Harper Lee's archives. It was kind of like a similar thing of like things that had no business showing up in public were randomly

showing up in public. And then there was like a lot of cease and desist letters being sent out as well. And of course the response to Federica from Mexico and the people of Mexico who wanted to access this archive is that this doesn't feel right. Yet another of Mexico's great artifacts taken by Europeans. Pillaged, yeah. Even before the conquistadors, you know, pillaging Mexican soil for gold and silver, you know. Spoiler alert, my Mexico story is going to have a lot to do with that too. It's kind of baked into the history of the region, unfortunately.

The extraction, yeah. But on the other hand, the archive is in a temperature controlled bunker underground, carefully monitored, like painstakingly, you know. Oh, she goes in there and counts them every day and she goes in there and counts them every night. And she feels that hit of serotonin when the numbers are the exact same. Right, yeah. Because nobody's looked at them for 20 years other than her.

Yeah. A very good point to not necessarily vilify Federica is that when the archive was being sold in the early 90s, the Mexican government should have bought it. If it is a question of Mexican identity, then there should have been more of a resolute response to the sale. But what were Mexico's, because I'm genuinely ignorant, what were Mexico's circumstances at that time? Was that a thing they could have afforded? I think that was part of it is that the widow who did inherit it was asking for a little over a million dollars for it. That kind of feels low, honestly.

I know, because Federica then paid, I think, close to three million for it. That even feels low to me for such like a, you could make a lot of money off this archive. That's true. You have to put a lot of money into it, but you can make a lot. Probably a little bit of a money pit, yeah, that's true. All 1,000 plus pounds of it. Yeah. So what does Federica herself say about these allegations that she's hoarding the Ragon's archive. A dragon, a cultural dragon of sorts. Yeah. I mean, and I think it's important to remember too that she is a scholar of architecture. So she's not just in there salivating over cool drawings. She's trying to understand it and

conceptualize it and be a scholar of it. And one of the things that stuck out to me, you know, she says a lot of stuff in her defense about like, archives take diligence and dedication, they take time to really understand we need to do surveys and checks. And, you know, the analysis of it is like, it's very time consuming. So we're just doing our due diligence. Like, I understand that. But then she has also said that she's worried about the possibility of the reproduction of Baragán's work and how that might cheapen Baragán's work. So here's a quote from her. More and more, Baragán is becoming the Frida Kahlo of architecture.

People ask for pictures and they want them now! You agree, I think you see them in a spread in a fashion magazine for something about how pink is the new color for spring." Yes and no. On the one hand, like, earnest attempts to examine this man and his art, I think can only be useful to his legacy. Like to someone like me not hearing about him for the first time in this context, but rather him being, I guess, like internationally on that Frank Lloyd Wright level to where

people like me who aren't particularly well studied in architecture at all would kind of recognize his name like a Wright, like an Eiffel, like a Gaudi. Yeah. Which I'm sure he already is that for a lot of people, right, but like, I also think that like, I get what she's saying about that pink thing at the end. I was like, that honestly, yeah, it's the Keith Haring thing, right?

It's the like, there are artists whose brands are just really, really, really saturated and not always necessarily in like a way that amplifies the effectiveness of their art. I agree. And I saw she gave this lecture on Betagon and towards the end, she was talking about access to his work and the copyright and stuff. And she threw up this slide of like Frida Kahlo essentially like stuff, you know, like Frida Kahlo press on nails and a thong. Because part of me is like, I understand that inclination, but on the other hand, I think,

and maybe Kahlo is not a good example because she was a communist and I think she would be like, no, my image is for the people, what the people do with it, which is, you know, in another turn ironic ironic, though, because they're using it to sell thongs and press on nails. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But on another hand, I do think that, like, Frida Kahlo's image actually did some research on her copyright, and the Kahlo family has some issues with it.

And a lot of the issues revolve around the representation of her being too like prettified. You can't make hot have like a unibrow and a mole and a fucking weird tooth and scoliosis and all the other free to share, right? Well, it's mainly the unibrow. They're like, she needs a unibrow. And if she has upper upper lip hair, that would be great too. Yeah. And I think that like that makes sense to me because it's like that's her image. And that was such a big part of what she did. We don't need to yassify Frida Kahlo.

No, the bitch knew what she was doing. No, she was like, I drew on my mustache extra thick this morning, as a matter of fact. But I but then OK, so there's that. But on the other hand, in Houston, there's a Frida Kahlo lookalike contest and people dress up like her, like they do the mustache extra thick that morning and they'll draw on unibrow and like the flower crowns and the traditional dress and stuff. I wonder if her image would be so readily replicated if it weren't on

press on nails and if it weren't on, you know what I mean? No, it's an interesting conundrum. There is a bit of a chicken in the egg there, I think. It is an interesting conundrum, for sure. No, interesting. Because part of that is like, you see the Barbie doll and then I go and Wikipedia her and I learn about her and then I pick up this book Whoa communism is pretty cool and who's this Karl Marx guy and it all just goes from there. Yeah. Yeah They did what to him with an ice pick. It's a whole big thing

So Federica is not immune to this resentment that seems to be bubbling up out of Mexico Toward her and towards the sale of the archive and the archive being in Switzerland, not Mexico. And in response to this, she says, quote, Mexico is very personal, which can be a good thing and a bad thing, end of quote. Thanks. Thanks, Federica.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll put that on the money. What I'm sensing from her with that is kind of like... That she sucks. Yeah, no, for sure. Well, that, but she's also just like, oh, well, you know, oh, it's hopeless. And they take siestas in the middle of the day.

It's just a cultural thing. They get very worked up about their national treasures. It reads exactly like that. OK, good. I love this because it seems to encapsulate this really well. So this like the rationale behind why somebody would hold on to this archive so tightly. And this comes from Patricio del Real, who was a curatorial assistant at MoMA Museum of Modern Art.

And he said, it might be a problem of being too close. When you're so close, you believe you're the only one who knows the correct way of understanding a person, which to me kind of hits the nail on the head. This idea that you there's only one way to understand a person and you know it. This now static individual is like you encapsulate it and you control it. And legally, too, you control it, which I think is dangerous. I'm sure she does have an exceeding amount of knowledge on this subject in this person, but it seems to have been spoiled by arrogance, which is a shame.

Yeah. As a scholar, I don't think you'll ever be sorry that you had humility. Yes, ooh, this is leading us into the proposal, this project, right? But I think it's important to note, was Baragon's archive truly a wedding present? And according to Federica, she firmly denies that it was an engagement present. Yeah, well, because it kind of looks bad, doesn't it? In like a very like, if you're a feminist,

it's not a very like, it's not how ideally you'd like to come into that archive is not through your own wits and guile, but because like a man bought it for you as like a diamond, a bauble. Yeah, yeah. And the interviewer who was asking her this question had said, you know, but I've heard this story so many, from so many different people, like what do you have to say about that? That it just seems to be, you know, baked into this. And Federica says, quote,

the story is too good to be true. The story of the engagement ring. Yeah. We are talking about Mexico here, the land of magical realism, end quote. Federica, you need, with all your money, you don't have someone doing these interviews for you by this point.

I know. Like that is like, holy shit. She's like, listen, I watched Coco. Let me tell you a little bit, some of a magical realism. It's also like, this isn't magical realism, girl. Like if your head turned into a diamond, that's magical realism. That's funny.

But it's like, what the fuck? If your head turned into a diamond. That's- Well, somebody's head did turn into a diamond. You start vomiting up the diamonds. Let me, come on. No, like, I do like the gusher head version though, too. Where it's like a gusher is commercially,

your head just becomes the thing. You break it. That's good too. I, yeah, no, she's- Gushers, a magical realism right there. Dude, she must be part of the fucking sour to club because she's sticking her foot in her mouth just left right in center here.

Ooh, boom ching, that was good. Holy shit, thank you, I'm quick on the drive, but she's not, she's fucking, she needs a padlock on that tongue. Yeah, okay, so here enters on this note of engagement in the proposal, here enters this American artist. Her name is Jill Maggid. She is born in Connecticut, 1973.

She goes to Cornell University. She goes to MIT. She studies visual studies there. She is a conceptual artist and her practice is performance based. This is from, you know, her artist statement on her website. She explores the emotional, philosophical and legal tensions between the individual and quote unquote protective institutions such as intelligence agencies or the police. It is typical of Maggot's practice that she follows the rules of engagement

with an institution to the letter, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Okay, so she's an artist, yeah. She's an artist, yeah. Taylor is squeezing the bridge of his nose. I'm the same way, real recognized, real fake recognized, fake this recognized, yeah. Taylor is squeezing his, uh, squeezing the bridge of his nose. I'm the same way. Real recognize, real fake recognize, fake this recognize this. It is what it is.

I'm the same way. Yeah. So I approach it with great affection and also a little bit of scoring because sometimes it can be a little bit silly. I'm interested to hear where she goes with this sort of malicious compliance thing that you seem to be talking about. To give you like a fuller sense of her, in one of her pieces, she shadows and befriends a New York City police officer for five months and like shares that story.

In another, she arranged for the police camera surveillance in Liverpool, England to record her every movement for a period of time. That's OK. And they went for that, huh? Yeah. In that's weird. Amsterdam. She actually I really like this story. She was in Amsterdam doing a residency. She had noticed all these security cameras everywhere. And she went to the police and she said, I'm an artist. My name is Joe Magid.

And I would like to bedazzle each of those security cameras." And they were like, um, what? No. And so- I like that. Six months later, she comes back, she has a business card and she says, hi, my name is Jill Magid and I am the CEO of Surveillance Beautified or like some like fake company, right? And she has this whole presentation that she gives them about like beautifying these spaces even when they're severely da da da. And they and they let her do it. Not only that, they give her money to do it.

They give her thousands of dollars to do the projects. It's all in the pitch, dude. It's all in the pitch. It's all in the pitch, dude. It's all in the pitch. It's all in the pitch. That is, that's a big one for Jill here. Yeah, that's interesting. That's funny. I like it.

Yeah. There is a lot of humor and I think that malicious compliance works into that. She's kind of bitchy about it. It's funny. Yeah. But what I do love is like that stuff angers me so much. And in trying to to communicate about it, I'm just like, ugh, well this is unfair.

No, no. I don't think that's nice. And she's like, I'm going to make a PowerPoint. Yeah. I'm going to get a grant. Yeah. And one of her other projects that I think is very important to note in this case is Auto Portrait Pending. very important to note in this case is auto portrait pending. It's from 2005 and it is the project is that the artist,

Jill Magid signed a contract with a company to become a diamond when she dies. So she has agreed, according to this contract, to relinquish her cremated remains. Or, you know, she will will somebody to do that. A lot of living wills in this episode folks. Get a living will. Get a living will. It's so true. They can't dispose of your corpse in the way that you'd like if you don't make your likes and wants and needs known. And the idea is that her remains will be created into a diamond that will be set into a gold ring.

That is the project. Cool. One last keeper. Yeah, auto portrait pending. Again, that's what it's called, right? And that's in 2005. So we start seeing her interest in Betagon's work in 2013. She's represented by a gallery in Mexico City called Labor.

And it is actually right across the street from Casa Vergon, from the museum of his house and studio. And she hadn't heard of Vergon at all, but she was like, Oh, what's that? And did the tour and got interested and learned more. One, about his architecture that she was taken with, but two, about this like crazy legal trap that the archive seems to be in. And so she works on five separate projects that all kind of build up to what's called the proposal, which is the Pentagon's body being made into a diamond. The first project that she works on, exhibition piece we can call it maybe, is in 2013 and

it's called Woman with Sombrero. And the idea is that she wanted to work with the archive and was denied. She wrote to Federica and said, you know, this is who I am. I bedazzled security cameras in Amsterdam. I'm going to make myself into a diamond. Let me come look at this archive. Sure, sure. And I should also say, you know,

she's been on display at MoMA and Tate London, you know, like she's like- She's established. Yeah. And Federica denies her, says, oh, we're working on a big catalog. Sorry, you can't, no, there's no time. We're just so strapped, sorry, no.

And so the exhibition becomes about how she can maybe get around the copyright issues, how she can like follow the letter of the law, but still like- In her classic style. Yes, in her classic style. So one of the things she does is she takes Federica's book, The Quiet Revolution, and she puts a picture frame on it and slaps it up on the wall. And so it becomes what they call like a ready-made, where it's like, it's already a piece of art. It's just the way that you frame it in this case. And like legally that's allowed because the book is a piece of property that can be used

that way. Yes. Like she does all these little things. And in this exhibition, she includes the letters that she wrote to Federica and the letters that Federica wrote back to her, denying her access to the archive. But if you don't know the history of Federica in this archive, this must look so petty. Oh yeah.

Which it still kind of is, like not a compliment, not a criticism, right? But yeah, yeah. And this whole beginning is Magid really just trying to ask what's the difference between loving something and loving something so much that you smother it. Possession, baby. Physical and emotional possession of a thing. It's a toxic kind of love. She goes on to do these other exhibitions that become part of her like, Baragon Archive project. And the next one is that she has Baragon's ashes turned into a diamond. And the full story of this

is that she is granted permission to stay at Casa Veragon, the museum. She's the first person to do so in 30 years, but she stays overnight in the guest room. She thinks she gets to stay in his room, but that's not the case. She has to stay in the guest room. Boo.

I would make a fucking mess of that guest room in protest. They wouldn't be letting that one out again for another 30 years after I was done with it. I would take a diarrhea and barricade guest bathroom because the real one's not accessible to me. I love it. And again, she's able to do this because Casa Barragan is run by the person who controls the private stuff.

The personal archive. Yes. OK. Yeah. She's also very drawn to this maybe true, maybe not true story of the archive being an engagement present for Federica. This bit of magic realism in the Mexican tradition. In the Mexican tradition. Exactly. And that kind of gets her brain thinking. And the ways that Federica seems to love slash smother the archives so much, it is a love story.

And in a way, it's this strange love triangle, right? Where Jill Maggott is like the third point of the triangle. If Federica and Baragon are in this smothering relationship then Jill inserts herself as this third point. She's the new girl showing up in her little sun dress, throwing open the windows and putting the cat amongst the pigeons. Yeah, her young, thick mane of brunette hair. The delicate brunette that old Baragon was looking for the whole time. Yeah.

And so she starts thinking along these lines. And of course we know her project from what, eight years before that she wants to turn herself into a diamond. She's very familiar with that process and what that looks like. And the idea of diamond and engagement, engagement ring. So she approaches the Pentagon family and he didn't have any direct descendants, but he has, you know, a nephew that's still alive and everybody has, you know, parents. So he does have a family that can speak to and make a decision on what to do with his remains. Right. So she invites them to a very nice dinner.

Everybody's dressed up. She's given them her camera bedazzling presentation. She has a PowerPoint slide. There we go, there we go. Multiple slides, she has a PowerPoint presentation. What's my return on investment? Why me, why now? Why Diamond? lot of questions.

Sharks, I want you to hear me out. I'm looking for $250,000 for 5%. Exactly. It's totally that. It's totally that. The Betagon family unanimously decides that they will do this. They will help her. They will give them their permission and do all the requisite legalese and paperwork that's needed to retrieve Batagon's ashes because they are like in a little box that's in a little cement wall and it's in this like special cemetery in Jalisco and they need to like make a request to the government of Jalisco and then they have to get, you know, it's all the crazy bureaucratic nightmare of. I get that that's like the logistical part of it, but like ideologically, did they ever say

what it was particularly about Maggad's presentation that swayed them? Do they also feel aggrieved that this archive is somewhat being held hostage or what? I didn't hear from them directly in terms of like, this is why. And I should say we don't because it's not presented in her exhibition or there's a film too. It's not presented there. But they do agree to what Jill is doing. And Jill's purpose is kind of in the vein of that malicious compliance and stuff. She's not quite pointing to Federica and say,

you have done wrong. You have done the Mexican people wrong. But she's trolling. She's trolling. But she is also very careful to say that she doesn't believe in the prank. The prank is something that you throw and you run away and we watch from afar. And her idea is like, I am committed. I'm not watching from afar.

I'm going to marry this woman if she says yes. Yes. I am turning into a diamond myself. Yeah. It's not, I'm not just turning Baragán into a diamond myself. Yeah. I'm not just turning Badagon into a diamond. I will be turned into a diamond too. And I think it's just like, it's just full blown intention. It's just like every day she wakes up and does this.

Every day she is thinking in these very complex ways. Performance artists are intense, dude. Oh, so intense. Extremely intense. But I think something that's really beautiful, Bada Ghan, watching the afternoon light make perfect right angles into his garden, he also was very intense. Yeah, she's in his spirit here. I agree.

Yeah. And I can only imagine that that might be... Well, let me put it this way. If I were a member of the Batagon family, that is what I would be reading off of this, is like you are in his intense, gnarly, very introspective spirit. And I respect that. It depends, but I'm gonna still just be like, oh, look, yet another white lady who's like me, I get Batagon, right? True.

And who's just like ultimately kind of an interloper injecting herself, but this time in the form of like taking possession of his physical remains. There's that interpretation too. Yeah. And I think that is very interesting that it's these two women who are not Mexican. Is Jill Magid white? I don't, I shouldn't say that, I don't actually know. She is, yeah.

She is English speaking. She is from Connecticut. Her work is American. Sure. To a degree, there's that component as well. I just think that Federica seems to have a bit of a stick up her ass about the whole thing and Magid's a lot more fun about it.

So I like her more, but they're kind of both Helen Lyle to to a degree here right? This is true but I imagine the Batagon family would like his archive to be back in Mexico too. That makes sense. Because that is a stipulation that she presents to them in her PowerPoint presentation. Prez eat it in from the left side. This view. Star Swipe. Repatriation, whoa. Diamond Swipe, in, out, in, out. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But she does specify that the ring that she will present, the proposal is that Federica will take this ring and in exchange for Baragon's body that's represented, not represented, it is the diamond, she will return his body of work, the archive, to Mexico. Wow. I like that a lot. It's kind of fucked up. I like things that are kind of fucked up, though. So it's very morbid. It's very weird and morbid. It's very morbid. It's very weird and morbid.

And the way that this is presented in the exhibition, which Mikhschel and I just stumbled on a few years ago at the Contemporary Art Museum. Love that. Go to museums, folks. It's the best. I love museums. It's so good. Yeah. very concentrated on the legalese, like the documents that the family signs, the documents between her, the artist, and Lifegym, the folks in Switzerland, actually, it's a Swiss company, who creates diamonds out of cremated remains. Those are what are on display. They're in these beautiful light boxes. There's a short film of when Jill Maggott and the Batagon family remove the remains. It's like this very beautiful. Is it the entirety of his remains? No. So what she removes is 530 ounces.

Okay. And in this gesture, she has made a 530 ounce sterling silver horse figurine that when they remove his remains, she replaces them with the horse. So when they like- He became the horse pool. He became the horse pool. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Full circle.

And he loved horses. So, you know, why not? And the pools. So the film that's on display that we got to see at the cam is this very like- This is very thoughtful art. It's very thoughtful and it's not sensational, I'd say that, it's not sensationalized. You don't hear about like, like, oh, finding a tooth

in the ashes or something like that. You know, it's very like, it's the paper and it's the patina of his urn when it's removed. It's like images of the family's hands doling out the ashes. And then when the diamond is made, his family receiving the diamond and on display is the diamond ring. Cool. And it's recessed in a wall with glass and light on it and it's all very clean. Like everything feels very like paper and light boxes, diamond in a box. The film is like, you know, very artfully edited. It is very thoughtful. Yes,

everything feels very thoughtful for the fact that like, oh my God, this famous dead guy was made into a diamond. Like there's just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What? Yeah. A lot to consider. A lot to consider. A lot to consider. Yeah. But that's good art. Good art gives you a lot to consider. It's true. A lot of things to think about. So there is a feature length film that's another one of these components of Jill Maggad's work and it's called The Proposal.

It was made in 2018 and it includes the short film that's part of the exhibition where they remove his patina to earn and everything like that. But it has like the whole story laid out, like everything's in it. Yeah. Kind of the version that you're giving me here. Yeah. And it ends with Jill Maggott in Switzerland at the fancy furniture design place, Vitra. They have a cafe. She's in the Vitra Cafe, sitting across from Federica and, surprise

to Jill, Rolf, Federica's husband. Oh yeah, I forgot about him. She proposes to Federica. How did she get the audience with Federica and Rolf? So in all of their exchanges, she had been inviting Federica to exhibits. In fact, she had one in Switzerland and she said, I would love it if you would come. Federica couldn't come. I'm sure.

Jill was like, what if I came to Vitra? I would love to meet you. And so I think it was just kind of pure persistence that allowed for it. Yeah. Just wore her down. And in the film, they're in this noisy cafe, but of course Federica hasn't given permission to be filmed in the cafe. And like what's filmed is like from across the street,

like through the trees. From the distance on a cell phone kind of thing. Yeah. And it's like Jill Maggott doing the talking, but of course it's soundless talking and like... But part of the proposal is a letter. So I'm gonna read you what Jill wrote in the letter. Beautiful.

And I'll condense it a little bit here. It starts, Dearest Federica, Thank you infinitely, as it was you who led me to Beragon, and Beragon who brought me back to you. As an artist, I've imagined what it would be like for a corporation to buy the rights to my name

and work after I died. It frightens me that my identity and authorship could be co-opted and restricted to a single interpretation. I do not question the care and commitment you've shown to the archive, but you have also become its obstacle. It is you alone who permits access to Badegans work

or denies it. And so it is with great admiration for your work and my heartfelt hope that the archive in Switzerland will be made accessible, that I come to you with this proposal. I offer you a ring. It is inspired by the ring that you negotiated with for Badagan's archive at the moment of your engagement.

The mounting holds a diamond in the rough, grown from the cremated remains of Badagan's body. Federica, I am proposing to give you Badagan in another form. This is a gift that requests a gift in return. The ring will always be available to you and you alone whenever you are ready to open the archive to the public in Mexico. You once confided in me through a letter that you were lonely down in the archive. With this ring, I propose that you needn't feel lonely anymore. I await your

response as ever, Jill." I wonder what the contents of their conversation via letter were with this lady was disclosing that she's lonely in the archives. I know. The film does share a few of the letters and that is one of them. They definitely signpost that one. Interesting. It's in response to Jill saying like, I love thinking about Baragon. I love being in his space and it's so nice to like think of you also thinking of him and in his space. And then I think

Federica writes in response like, this is so nice, this communion that we have over Baragon because so often I feel lonely in the archive. Interesting, but she needn't feel lonely in the archive really. No. It's a self-inflicted loneliness this. And it's interesting that like we see again, and perhaps this is just her being a good saleswoman, we don't know, but if it's genuine, there's an interesting parody in Maggid's remarks about not wanting a corporation to kind of make her a brand and her work a brand and sort of Federica's similar concerns over what might happen to Baragon's work in that way.

There's a link there, right? But that's assuming that that's not Maggid knowing that there's a link and exploiting it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. An interesting proposal, figuratively and literally. I would say I don't know how well it will be received when you couch it in this proposal engagement gift thing that she evidently fucking hates.

Right. That's a bit shady, you know? Yeah. But that's Megan. I feel like all of her shit is a little bit shady. Right. It's coming with like, I don't know, like this kind of sincerity that she like dives into. But I don't, I think sometimes she like maybe much like Federica into the archive, she kind of dives so deep that she kind of can believe her own shit, you know? Yeah. Again, that's, that's a good artist, isn't it? That means you're in the right line of work. Yeah. How did she respond in the moment?

So in the moment, Federica, the letter is not read to her because Jill kind of like, oh, Rolf is here. This is weird. I'm like proposing to her. Now is not the time to get awkward. Follow through. I know she doesn't. She just passes her the letter. She does say like, I'm proposing a swap here. I'm proposing Bartagon's body for the body of his work. Get down on one knee.

So in the moment, Federica says, oh, and asks questions about the process to be made into a diamond. Will this ring be on display in your exhibition? She kind of like takes it as like, this is your art practice. This isn't real. This is your art practice. Right, right, right. And to a journalist about the experience, Federica says, I found it very touching that it he, meaning the ring, was between us there next to a cappuccino in this cafe. She said that

she thought that Maggad was hardworking, intelligent, and charming. And quote, Jill has done a beautiful telenovela. End quote. She's shady too, though. She's so shady. She's shady too though. She's so shady. She's shady in a shadier way. Two shady queens. I don't know what to say. Yeah.

Three Ficamparagans. That was more of like a mid-afternoon shade. It really had, the sun has to be at like a very specific angle, but it's still shade. Yeah. And she does pose the question to at least the interviewer, Federica does, like, what does Jill really mean by having it returned to Mexico?

Who will it go to under what circumstances? And I think like, yes, that's important, but like, that's not really the point. Like you can find, fuck, you have so much money. Why don't you just build the archive, a home in Mexico? Yeah, permanent location that people can kind of come in and access this material. Near Casa Baragán, ideally, right? Yeah, or if you love Baragán so much, why don't you, if you don't have the money, you can seek out that money, seek investors and grants and whatnot.

That's a weasely question because it's like, that's not really the point. Federica's seems like a rich lady. It's hard to ask someone to give up that like their life's work, their life's work, but also like control. People don't like to give up control. Yeah. Power. People don't like to give up power.

If you make that archive freely accessible, that any old person can look at it. You didn't like, what's the point of you having negotiated it, you know? So Federica does write a letter in response to Jill's letter. And of course this all gets picked up in the Mexican press. So Federica's response is published in the Mexican press and I'll read you part of it.

Sure. Dear Jill. Not dearest mind you. Just dear, yeah. You have turned speculation regarding the engagement and all this into art and in the process you have transformed me into a character of fiction. Therefore my real self is irrelevant to your project and my active participation unnecessary. You are far better served by your own imagination." Signed, Federica's uncle. Kind of got her. Kind of got her. Kind of got her. Yeah. Because like honestly, yeah,

I mean, it doesn't really matter what I've said because like, whatever character you needed me to be in this, I've already been for you. Besitos, I'm going to go do snow angels and some slides of Batagon's work. She's like, well, I'm not changing anything. And obviously this wasn't a reality. So ciao. Yeah, see you later. As of 2022, the Batagon Foundation has moved the professional archive from Switzerland to another Vitra campus in Germany.

There's a permanent exhibition space and a study room with a specialized library. And this is meant to facilitate scholarly research. So the archive is opening up just a little bit. There's an exhibit that you can go visit. I don't quite know how it is to access the entire archive. It seems like only parts of it are totally accessible. You'll note it's not in Mexico,

it's in Germany, which I think is slightly damning in the fact that, oh, you moved the archive, but you moved it to somewhere else in Germany. Which I think is kind of, that's slightly damning in the fact that like, oh, you moved the archive, but you moved it to somewhere else in Europe? Like, come on. Yeah, that's Europe. That's Europe for you. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah. Maggad's work, the Beragon Archives, which is part, it's not the entirety of those exhibitions and film and everything, but kind of certain parts of it, including the film and Woman with Cebrero and a few of like letter, you know, like kind of piecemeal here and there. They had been acquired by a museum in France, Sainte-Trépompadu, which I was like, oh, got her ass, some rich person bought it and now it's in like the private

archive. And then I looked up the museum and it's like French's National Museum and it's free to go and like it's open to everybody. Very little museum. Yeah, sorry. It looks rad. Yeah, we should go take a look. After we take the tow shot, we'll drive over. We know what Zonko is doing in Germany. We know Maggott is still walking the line very carefully. Militias compliance with her work. Baragon, still dead, still a diamond.

But I do want to give our last word to Baragon because he is the diamond in this centerpiece, you know? So Baragon was asked about the destruction of his many works. A lot of his private homes had been taken down, but even some of the public works in his lifetime. And so, he was asked, like, what are your feelings about this, either the destruction or the abandonment of your work? And Baragon says in reply, it is unfortunate that we live in an age whose supreme value

is money. Hence architecture, especially landscape architecture, which he was so fond of, becomes fragile and painfully ephemeral. Which I do think kind of reflects onto this whole story of copyright law and having lawyers and having like money to back you up as a big time artist to get made into a diamond, like so frustrating. But though at the same time, but again, had money. Had the horse, yeah, and the horse pool. Yeah, yeah.

Interesting story though, quite a confluence of eccentric characters. I know this very strange love triangle. Yeah, no, very, very love triangle of eccentric characters. I think the real question though is, Taylor, would you be made into a diamond? Um, like not a diamond specifically. I don't really care for diamonds. I'm not opposed to having my body made into something fun though, like something kind

of wacky. Yeah, sure. I mean, you could be like, they have those bio burials where you're like at the base of a tree, a tree of course, when you're remain. Fuck yeah, let's do that. Let the worms eat me. I don't know. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Actually, I kind of like that. How about you? Would you be a diamond? They're forever. They are forever. There's something about the diamond. It's very beautiful. It's very hard.

It feels like it lasts forever and that's really nice. But it's also an object that can be lost or an object that can be like put too much attention on not unlike maybe Federica's deal with the archive. Yeah. And so then maybe there's something to spreading them. You know what I mean? Just do the job. Or maybe there's something to having them. You know what I mean? Just do the job. Or maybe there's something to having those diamonds installed

into your own teeth, because then that, it enters another cycle. You accidentally swallow it, like the toe, bada bing, bada boom, you know? Oof, oof, oof, yeah, no. No thanks. I don't wanna swallow a diamond. I don't wanna swallow a toe.

Let's not do that then. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our ko-fi account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinfamy. But no pressure, bittersweet infamy is free, baby! You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet!

My sources for this episode include the DawsonCity.ca website page, Sourdough Cocktail Club. I read the Atlas Obscura page for the Sourdough Cocktail. I read the history of the Sourdough Cocktail, a shot of whiskey garnished with the human toe on the CBC website. And I watched the 2017 CBC short docs release Sourdough, the story of the story can. The sources that I used for this episode include an article from the New Yorker magazine, The Architect Who Became a Diamond, a conceptual artist devises an ingenious plan for negotiating

access to a hidden archive, by Alice Gregory, published July 25, 2016. I watched the film The Proposal, 2018, directed by Jill Magid. I read an article Casa Luis Baragon, Sacred Space of Mexican Modernism by Lindsay Garbutt, published on DailyJStore.org September 19th, 2018. The article, Why is the Work of Mexico's Most Famous Architect Hidden in Switzerland? Written by Alyssa Walker, published July 29th, 2016, in Curved. I read selections from Artes de Mexico, Nueva Apoca, Numero 23, en el mundo de Luis Baragán, published Spring 1994. I read the article Tug of War Structures Architects' Legacy by Randy Kennedy in the New York Times, published November 3rd, 2013. I read an article, Architecture, Luis Ramiro Baragán-Morfini,

by Effy Michellaro for dreamideamachine.com. I looked at the website for the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in particular, photos and article on Luis Baragán, including his acceptance speech, which is published in full there. I looked at Jill Maggott's website, which includes explanations and artist statements concerning all of her exhibitions. I looked at BaragonFoundation.org website, which has a very thorough timeline and some

images to look at. I watched part of a YouTube video of Federica Zenca giving a lecture on Beragon entitled Mixtropilo 2016 Federica Zanco Beragon Foundation posted to YouTube by channel Arquín March 30th 2016. A big shout out to all of our subscribers on coffee.com that's k-o-f-i.com slash bittersweet infamy. We've got Lizzie D, Terry McCann, Soph, Dylan the Person, and Sackadil the Cat, Erica Jo Brown, and Jonathan Mountain. If you too would like to become a monthly subscriber, head over to ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy.com

slash bittersweetinfamy. There you can donate, become a monthly subscriber, and then in exchange, you can become a member of the Bittersweet Film Club. January's movie was Battlefield Earth, suggested by Dylan McPherson on Sack to the Cat. Bittersweet Empathy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. This episode was lovingly edited by Alex McCarthy with help from Alexi Johnson. The Bittersweet Infamy cover photo was kindly taken by Ouk Bitley over at 604 Podcast Network. The interstitial music you heard earlier is by Mitchell Collins,

and the music you are listening to now is Tea Street by Brian Steele.