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.
Vicente Marotta (1928–1994) graduated with a degree in architecture in 1963. He then started exhibiting his sculptures and ceramic works and, in 1968, took part in Materiales: Nuevas Técnicas, Nuevas expresiones, the exhibition organized by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. Marotta collaborated with the CAYC from its very early days; he showed his work at Escultura, follaje y ruidos (1970), the open air exhibition organized by the center in the Plaza Rubén Darío in Buenos Aires. Marotta presented a children’s “ride” with Glusberg and Luis Fernando Benedit at that event and at Arte de sistemas (1971) at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires. At the end of that year, he became one of the original members of the Grupo de los Trece. After that his work was shown at multiple editions of Arte de Sistemas and Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano, the exhibitions that the CAYC presented in several cities in the Americas and Europe.
Signos en ecosistemas artificiales was the installation that the Grupo de los Trece presented at the XIV São Paulo Biennial in 1977. It sought to condense the members’ individual poetics in a complementary way that was conducive to a group reading. According to Glusberg—who was involved as both curator and artist—“artificial ecosystems” was an alternative term that could be applied to art objects. Similarly, Marotta claimed that “the sum of artistic discourse constitutes a ‘language’ of art; that is, a paradigm that can present portrayals by means of a web of relationships.” (Jorge Glusberg, The group of thirteen. XIV Biennial of São Paulo, [Buenos Aires: CAYC, 1977].) The group’s installation at the São Paulo Biennial was awarded the Grande Prêmio Itamaraty by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations.
Más y mejores alimentos para el mundo was Marotta’s contribution to this group effort. By focusing on culture and food, his work sought to encourage reflection on the planet’s food requirements in the near future and the prominent role that Latin America would play as a reservoir of natural resources.
