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.
The eagerness to create links between Latin American and Eastern European art was a key component in the CAYC’s somewhat politicized strategy for international exchange. The center advocated a “unity of strengths” among local art scenes in what were considered Third World countries that Glusberg saw as a form of art thatwas part of the world scene but still addressed the specific problems the countries had in common. The CAYC decided to develop connections that were of particular significance during the Cold War, at a time when the Theory of Dependence was being introduced throughout Latin America, an attempt to explain that the poverty the region’s countries were experiencing was a result of the oppression exerted by the major world powers.
Through the CAYC’s connections in what were then socialist countries, particularly in Poland, Glusberg organized the exhibition Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano at the Wspókczsna Gallery in Warsaw [see GT-270 A (doc. no. 1476487)]. Having organized the exhibition Fotografía Experimental polaca [GT-100 (doc. no. 1476356)], the CAYC here presents photographs by Andrzej Lachowicz, Natalia Lachowicz, and Zbigniew Dłubak, who had taken part in the previous exhibition at the Club Universitario in La Plata. These artists call themselves the “PERMAFO group” (an abbreviation for “permanent photography”), the name of the gallery they started with the art critic Antoni Dzieduszycki in the city of Wroclaw in the 1970s. They produced exhibitions, actions, lectures, publications, performances, and events. As happened with other spaces run by artists, the PERMAFO gallery was fertile ground for the development of experimental photography in Poland during those years.
