Tras las Huellas de Mangoré

Concept

Agustín Barrios Mangoré spent his life travelling. Born in Paraguay in 1885, he played across South and Central America, often in theatres that still stand today. He died in El Salvador in 1944, and for decades his work was known more through other people's recordings than under his own name. "Tras las Huellas de Mangoré" is Berta Rojas making that journey again in September 2011: four countries in thirteen days, with a different guest star at each stop and local musicians joining in each city, so the tour was not an artist passing through but an encounter with each country's scene.

The site does the only thing a site can do with that: give it geographic form. The home page is the map of South America with the four points joined by orange lines to their pages, and beside it a player with the concert videos —Las Abejas, Recuerdos de Ypacaraí, Pájaro Choguí— presented as a strip of film. Someone who attended none of the four concerts can watch the whole journey and hear it. After the tour, the site becomes an archive: the galleries of each theatre with the audience on its feet, the hall full. For a tour that existed four times over thirteen days, that is all that remains.

Total white, orange and grey, with one graphic idea held throughout: Mangoré's signature. The logo writes his name in an orange handwritten stroke that rises and falls like a mountain range, and that same stroke, enlarged and in the palest grey, crosses the footer of every page. The map is drawn in flat grey, with no relief and no borders: the composition is that of an infographic, not of an event site. It is the third project around Berta Rojas —alongside her personal site and the Barrios Competition— and all three share one mission: taking Barrios's work to the world.