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 Glusberg developed a network of South American and international institutions that were involved with experimental practices. These institutions offered similar programs to encourage the production and exhibition of Conceptual works in a contemporary circuit created by new cultural spaces and centers.
Muriel Olesen (1948–2020) was a key figure in the experimental scene in her native Switzerland. She was a member of Ecart, a group of artists with a space of their own and a publishing house founded in 1969 in Geneva. The Ecart group soon established itself as a point of reference in Europe, devoted to the organization of exhibitions and the publication of artists’ books, becoming a meeting place for an international network of artists working in the fields of performance, video art, and mail art. The nature of their programs and the projects they supported were very much in line with the CAYC’s goals, both in terms of their experimental approach and their focus on creating opportunities for circulation and exchange.
Olesen worked with Gérald Minkoff (1937–2009) to create a project based on photography and film; music, rhythm, and humor were major elements in their video pieces. After Olesen took part in the Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video (GT-S/N; doc. no. to be confirmed, GT-606; doc. no. 1477317) held in Ferrara, Italy (1975) and Antwerp, Belgium (1976), the CAYC distributed newsletters in 1977 that promoted her works (GT-776; doc. no. 1477439).
This newsletter published a photograph of one of her video installations in which she delivered a scathing review of technology and power. Ever since her earliest works, Olesen sought to identify connections among the appearance of an object, its meaning, and its name. In her attempts to show what the human eye does not immediately perceive, she explored the difference between reality and its reflection by examining the projection of shadows and the visualization of the voice via chromatic codes.
