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. The second Encuentro (Gathering) took place at the Espace Pierre Cardin in Paris, an art center located in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées with a large theater, galleries, restaurants, and meeting rooms. Pierre Cardin (1922–2020), the famous couturier, took over the exhibition space in 1970 and turned into a showroom for art, fashion, and interior design.
Unlike the first Encuentro in London—that was part of a larger event that included films, theater, and music—the one in France focused entirely on video. (Glenn Phillips and Sophia Serrano, “Encounters: CAyC and the International Encuentros,” in Phillips and Shtromberg, eds., Getty Research Institute, 2023.) The list of participants included artists from Argentina, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Colombia, Spain, the United States, France, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Israel, the Philippines, Poland, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia. Some of the most prominent attendees (including artists, critics, and curators) can be seen in this collection of photographs that the CAYC distributed when the Encuentro was over, which illustrated the scale of the event.
