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 an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Going back to the CAYC’s very early years, showing films was an important part of the center’s exhibition programs, in keeping with its goal of positioning itself as a space for experimental work, especially for projects that sought to combine art, technology, and communication. The CAYC thus continued doing the work that the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella had been doing in Argentina in the 1960s, motivating the avant-garde as it engaged with the logic of the mass media, encouraging an exploration of interdisciplinary approaches, and supporting visual artists who were trying their hands in the fields of radical theater, fashion, design, and film. In Glusberg’s view, collaborative works of that kind provided a way to promote a new social order.
Activities of this sort became a regular part of the CAYC’s programs in 1974, when Glusberg took part in Open Circuits. An International Conference on the Future of Television, at MoMA in New York, and then in the Encuentros Internacionales de Video presented at the center in Buenos Aires and in London, Paris, Ferrara, Antwerp, Caracas, Barcelona, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo.
One year earlier, Glusberg joined forces with Pedro Roth and Danilo Galasse to create Ediciones del Tercer Mundo (Third World Publications), a collective that promoted the production of Latin American publications and videos and organized festivals for non-commercial films. The term “non-commercial” was a reference to films that were shot on Single 8, Super 8, and 16 mm film by amateur filmmakers, as distinct from the 35 mm film used in commercial productions.
Reporting on some of this activity, this newsletter announces a program at the CAYC that would include a screening of films by Claudio Caldini and Horacio Valleregio. Both of these filmmakers (as well as Narcisa Hirsch, Marie-Louise Alemann, and Silvestre Byrón, among others) were members of the Grupo Goethe, an experimental film collective that was active in the Buenos Aires art scene in the 1970s. The group set about rethinking not just the overall language of filmmaking but the production, exhibition, and distribution of their works as well. In keeping with the “Manifesto of the New American Cinema” (1962) championed by Jonas Mekas (among others), the group called for creative freedom, the use of smaller gauge film, and more modest production budgets than those required to finance commercial movie making.
