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 architect, urban planner, and artist Clorindo Testa (1923–2013) was one of the most prominent figures in the field of South American architecture; he was also a member of the Grupo de los Trece. In the 1970s he began to produce work of a conceptual nature. The city and pollution were themes that he addressed in new series that were based on the threat of disease and other destructive scourges, such as La peste en la ciudad (1977), La peste en Ceppaloni (1978), and Tendederos de la peste (1979). Together with these works that were rooted in urban problems (one of his specialties), Testa created others that were based on experiences, objects, or drawings from his childhood, such as Caperucita roja (1975).
This newsletter published a sketch from the series La peste en la ciudad, in which the plagues and epidemics of the past were treated as metaphors for the overcrowding in cities and the lifestyle of the contemporary world as underscored by the failure of the modernist development in Latin America. The work that Glusberg mentions in his text consists of a set of thirty playing cards, measuring 130 centimeters high, arranged in a three-dimensional structure like a “house of cards.” Other designs are supported by bricks (which create an installation on the floor). Several of them include sketches of rats (which spread disease) swarming the city, preying on sleeping people, and even emerging from the mouths of people shown in the illustrations.
In subsequent newsletters (GT-774; doc. no. 1477437">1477437, GT-775; doc. no. 1477438">1477438), Glusberg writes: “as an architect, Clorindo Testa is sensitive to the city; as an artist, he is sensitive to the harmful, destructive effects of urban pollution, which is why he condemns it in his large painted playing cards.” La peste en la ciudad, along with works by the other members of the Grupo de los Trece, was shown at the XIV São Paulo Biennial in October 1977 as part of the installation Signos en ecosistemas artificiales, which won the Grande Prêmio Itamaraty.
In the months prior to the group’s joint participation in the São Paulo Biennial, the CAYC organized solo exhibitions for some of the members of the Grupo de los Trece. (See GT-737; doc. no. 1477389, GT-738; doc. no. 1477390, GT-746; doc. 1477396, GT-757; doc. no. 1477397, GT-758; doc. no. 1477398, GT-759; doc. no. 1477399, GT-761; doc. no. 1477419, GT-765; doc. no. 1477432, GT-766; doc. no. 1477433, GT-773; doc. no. 1477436, GT-774; doc. no. 1477437">1477437, GT-775; doc. no. 1477438">1477438, GT-785; doc. no. 1477448, and GT-786; doc. no. 1477449.)
