Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Arte en cambio was an exhibition of works by the Grupo de los Trece at the CAYC. The list of participants confirms that Horacio Zabala had officially joined the group by then. He came up with the title of the exhibition, thinking of a broad approach to the idea of freedom, which was in short supply during that period of multiple coups d’états and authoritarian military regimes. Zabala was referring to the fact that artists were free to change the focus of their work rather than doing what they had already done and repeating themselves over and over again. Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997) also participated in the exhibition; he was never a member of the Grupo de los Trece, but was a frequent guest artist at their events. [See GT-39 (doc. no.1476286) and GT-49 (doc. no. 1476289)].
The photograph in the newsletter was taken at CAYC al aire libre. Arte e ideología, the exhibition at the Plaza Roberto Arlt in Buenos Aires, one of the venues selected for Arte de sistemas II. Specifically, it was of La realidad subterránea, a work that was not in the catalogue but was installed by a group of participants (Roberto Duarte Laferrière, Eduardo Leonetti, Luis Pazos, and Ricardo Roux). These artists wrote the text and painted a funeral line of sixteen crosses with lime at the entrance to an old (buried) public bath that housed a collection of photographs of the Holocaust. The exhibition’s comparison of the Holocaust to the recent execution of political prisoners at the Trelew prison (in the province of Chubut, north of Patagonia) irritated law enforcement officials enough for them to shut it down after less than forty-eight hours.
The event in question—known as the “Massacre of Trelew”—took place in August 1972, when a group of political prisoners, militant members of the ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo), the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias), and the Montoneros (Peronists), who were imprisoned at Rawson prison, took over the penitentiary and the nearby Trelew airport in an escape attempt. Military officials retaliated by immediately executing sixteen of them.
