Barrios WorldWideWeb Competition 2011

Concept

Agustín Barrios Mangoré is the most important Paraguayan composer for the classical guitar worldwide, and for decades he was also the most ignored outside specialist circles. That his work would be played in Taiwan, Russia or Jordan was not a given: it had to be provoked. That is what this competition did, and it is why the format matters as much as the prize: an in-person contest would have drawn the guitarists who can afford a flight to Asunción; this one, running entirely online, drew 70 from 30 countries. For a young guitarist studying in Taiwan, the barrier to entry stopped being a plane ticket and became a camera.

The jury gives the true measure of it: Eduardo Fernández (Uruguay, artistic director), Martha Masters (United States), Lito Barrios (Paraguay), Fábio Zanon (Brazil) and Yasuji Ohagi (Japan). Five countries, five schools. And the result was the one the idea was after: Chen Chuan (China) and Tariq Harb (Jordan) tied for first place, with Anton Baranov (Russia) second. A Paraguayan composer who died in 1944 had a Chinese, a Jordanian and a Russian competing against each other, online, from Asunción.

The site was in four languages —Spanish, English, Japanese and Chinese— which is not an accessibility detail but a statement about who was being addressed. The recurring element is the portrait card: every entrant and every jury member is a black-and-white photograph with an orange band underneath carrying the name and country; lined up, those cards are the entire navigation of the competition — you browse people, not a menu. It is proof of the relationship with Berta Rojas beyond her personal site: when the artist puts together a project to spread Barrios's work, I build the digital side of it.