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 the CAYC became a reference point for experimental practices in South America. Some of this activity was happening alongside a great wave of experimentation and unconventional exhibitions in Brazil—at the MAC-USP, under the direction of Professor Walter Zanini—where similar programs were being designed to stimulate the production and exhibition of Conceptual works, some of which were considered subversive in the sociopolitical climate of repression and censorship imposed by dictatorships in the region at that time. In 1976 the two institutions sponsored a South American tour for Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, allowing him to visit Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina. Based on his sojourns in those four countries, the Spanish Conceptual artist produced a record of his travels, providing a critical narrative of his experiences in each city, which he called Informe y resumen general de actividades en Sudamérica. Valcárcel Medina subsequently sent works to Década de 70, the exhibition organized by the CAYC.
Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (b. 1937) was a pioneer in the field of Conceptual art in Spain, shattering conventional approaches to art. His works involve the creation of “situations,” interventions, actions, or projects which transcend the goal of an art object, revealing his commitment and disdain for the commercial aspects of art.
Valcárcel Medina had a solo show at the CAYC at which he exhibited several examples of his “actions.” One of them took place in Paraguay, before arriving in Buenos Aires: 136 Manzanas de Asunción. The work consisted of him walking through the streets of Asunción, the capital city, where he would approach passersby and ask them to walk with him for a block (“block” is “manzana” in Spanish). In this way he collected information about the neighborhood, his companion, and the city or the country, assembling a great deal of sociopolitical data about the place he was visiting. In one of his other actions, which was explicitly political, he asked people to sign the name of the Chilean president, Salvador Allende (1908–1973), on a large sheet of paper. The original idea was for the sheets to keep circulating so that others could sign them. To avoid problems with the censors during the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–83), he was advised to destroy the copy he took to Buenos Aires.
