This exhibition-essay has only one subject: Ana Hatherly and the Baroque. However, we will not focus solely on the influence of the Baroque on the artist’s work, but on how Ana Hatherly’s research and experimentation enhanced the value of this disparaged historical period and modified our concept of the past – after all, tradition is an unexplored territory of adventure and continual amazement.

In this way, bringing together objects, artworks and documents from different historical periods, which Ana Hatherly analysed or mentioned in her essays, we organised an exhibition itinerary through the essential categories of the Baroque: the World as Labyrinth; the importance of the Playful; the Nothingness of Life before Death; the Allegory and the joy of Interpretation; the oblique Dialogue between painting and poetry; and the Metalanguage of the artwork that reflects itself.

There are as many entrances to this building as there were multiple declinations in Ana Hatherly’s work: essays and academic research; poetry and prose; drawings, re-collages, performances, films, television programmes… A labyrinth where everything revolves around the writing, as she said. That garden made from ink, where the artist reinvents the world walking among signs, is the enigmatic place of the game – and of this exhibition as a game.