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.
The ICC was a major player in the experimental art scene in Antwerp in the mid-1970s. From 1972 to 1983, the Centrum functioned as both a contemporary and international facility, becoming a forum for exposing new art forms, especially video art. To encourage and promote these efforts, the ICC established a production center called Continental Video.
The ICC hosted the exhibition Kunstsystemen in Latijn-Amerika (Systems Art in Latin America) in April–May 1974 (GT-403; doc. no. 1476538). An event that was presented simultaneously with the opening of this exhibition—called the Latin American Week—could be considered one of the forerunners of the Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video. The press coverage of the fifth Encuentro reflected the excellent reception it received among local media, which saw the event as an important step in the evolution of video art in Belgium. (Glenn Phillips and Sophia Serrano, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America, Getty Research Institute, 2023.)
Florent Bex (b. 1937), the Belgian director of the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum in Antwerp from 1972 to 1981, was a regular participant in the various editions of the CAYC’s Encuentros, providing videos, taking part in roundtable discussions, and serving as a presenter on panels. He also advised Glusberg about which European artists, curators, and critics should be invited. In addition to producing his own work, under the pseudonym “Hubert Van Es,” in which he explored the impact of video techniques on our perception in ways that were both simple and poetic, Bex organized a number of different exhibitions.
The CAYC and the ICC continued to work together after collaborating on the exhibition Arte belga de hoy first presented in Argentina at the Museo Genaro Pérez in Córdoba in April–May 1976 (GT-614; doc. no. pending). These events featured works by contemporary artists with a particular emphasis on installations and Conceptual artists.
