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.
During the 1970s Glusberg established relationships with South American and international institutions that were involved in experimental practices, providing them with similar programs to inspire the production and exhibition of Conceptual ideas, especially given the violent methods employed by dictatorial regimes across the continent at that time. The MAC USP (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo), directed by the professor and curator Walter Zanini (1925–2013), played a vital role in the Brazilian art world. Glusberg and Zanini helped to promote the expansion of “a transnational dialogue zone” to organize a variety of different initiatives such as an exchange of artists at a regional and international level, exhibitions, and symposiums (Luiza Mader Paladino, Caiana, 2016).
Another crucial link between the CAYC and the Brazilian avant-garde in those days was the critic, curator, and Brazilian art historian, Aracy Amaral (1930). The bond was all the stronger thanks to her role as director of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and, during the following decade, the MAC USP. Some of the visual artists already mentioned, who were from several states in Brazil, became involved in working with experimental films and audiovisuals.
The exhibition Brasil 74 had been shown at the CAYC in Buenos Aires (see the ICAA Digital Archive [GT-411 (doc. no. 1476541]). It was shown at the Club Universitario in La Plata, the provincial capital, a social and sporting club that, in 1973, also functioned as the center’s cultural annex. The club had a cultural commission to arrange such events, which included the architect Jorge Sica (1931–2012) and Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997), a regular collaborator with the CAYC. Vigo organized countless exhibitions at the club, showing his own work at times, giving talks, and designing leaflets.
