Barroco is a journey, from the hills of eastern Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina, past the Iguaçu Falls and through Rio de Janeiro’s old town to Minas Gerais in Brazil. A quest to find the roots of a continent’s cultural identity – Latin American baroque. This is not a search for the well-known, authentic monuments of indigenous culture, not Aztecs, Mayas or Incas, but rather the cultural traces of daily survival between religion and the modern world, decaying ruins, magnificent state buildings and squalid shanty towns.

Barroco explores how art, architecture and music address the contemporary gulf between poverty and progress, jungle and city, and the historical struggle to reconcile the native Indian population, European conquistadors and African slaves. In a series of spectacular images, Heinz Peter Schwerfel, art critic, award-winning filmmaker and author of a literary portrait of Buenos Aires, tells of the origins and remnants of the first model of a multicultural society.

This society was made possible by a unique phenomenon which has remained controversial to this day – the Italian and Spanish philosophical and religious vision of the unity of the self and the world, spirit and reason, the psyche and the mind, which conquered Latin America in the 17th century and still influences culture and life there today.