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 exhibition, titled 2.972.453 (the population of Buenos Aires at the time), included works by international Conceptual artists. It was part of a series of exhibitions whose titles reflected the populations of the host cities (see GT-20 [doc. no. 1476278]).
Jointly curated by Lucy (Rowland) Lippard (b. 1937), one of the leading figures in the field of Conceptual art in the United States—which was amply represented (with a few foreign examples) a few months earlier at the MoMA show Information (1970)—and Jorge Glusberg, the event at the CAYC consisted of a dialogue. In the exhibition, there were various proposals in which the value of ideas took precedence over the material production or assembly of the pieces. In this interdisciplinary intertwining, Lippard and Glusberg acted as both curators and artists.
The opening included other events as well, such as the music group Free Ensamble and the dancer Susana Zimmermann (1932–2021), both of whom were prominent in the field of experimental stage productions.
