One speech,
four voices.

Who he was

Manuel Gutiérrez de la Concha e Irigoyen (1808-1874), first Marquis of Duero, is the person San Pedro Alcántara owes its existence to as we know it. A soldier and politician, in 1860 he founded an agricultural colony built around growing sugar cane. It became the most important agricultural colony in Spain in the second half of the 19th century, and the largest created by private initiative.

He named it in honour of his favourite saint and of his mother, Petra de Alcántara Irigoyen. Under his drive came the sugar mill, which saved carrying the cane all the way to the mills in Málaga, and the church that became the town's parish. He died in 1874, mortally wounded at the battle of Monte Muru, during the Third Carlist War. Today the town's main avenue bears his name.

My approach

He opens the journey, in the town of his time. I started from several illustrations of him. Each one interprets him in its own way, so the work was to keep the features that repeated and turn them into a believable photographic face, that of a 19th-century soldier. His voice comes from the ElevenLabs library.

Who he was

He was born in Alcántara (Cáceres) in 1499 and died in Arenas de San Pedro (Ávila) in 1562. A Franciscan friar, reformer and driving force behind the Discalced movement, he was an important figure of 16th-century Spanish spirituality. Today he is the patron saint of Extremadura.

His life was marked by austerity and penance. He founded El Palancar, near Pedroso de Acim, known as the smallest convent in the world. He wrote a short treatise on prayer that was translated into every European language. He was also a support and spiritual director to Saint Teresa of Ávila, whom he advised in her reform of the Carmelites.

My approach

There are no photographs of the saint, only the image that painting and sculpture have passed down over the centuries. That's why his face starts from illustrations and statues, which is how the town knows him.

I placed him in El Palancar because that small convent sums up his way of seeing life better than any explanation. The quill, a nod to his writings, and the dove are woven into the scene naturally, without underlining them. Those who know his iconography recognise them; those who don't see a coherent scene.

His voice belongs to a real person, chosen by the speaker and used with their explicit permission.

Who he was

In 2004, the speaker's father was due to give the Brotherhood of San Pedro de Alcántara's speech. A health problem prevented him. Twenty-two years later, his son, now the speaker himself, wanted to pay tribute to him by finishing that speech together. That's why his appearance isn't an effect, but the closing of something left unfinished.

My approach

He was the most delicate character and the one that set the bar for the whole project. In the other two cases, the reference was an artistic interpretation. Here it was a real person, whose face his family and neighbours would recognise.

The face was rebuilt by combining old photographs with frames from family videos. The videos brought what a photo lacks: gesture, and the face in motion. His scene takes place in the town's present-day church and its square.

The voice was the biggest challenge. We tried to rebuild it from fragments of audio and video, but the result wasn't good enough. I talked it over with the speaker and we decided his father would speak with his son's voice. With a likeness that left no room for error, we preferred a meaningful voice to an imperfect imitation. That decision ended up giving the scene a meaning of its own: father and son sharing, at last, the same speech.