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.
Clorindo Testa (1923–2013), the architect, urbanist, and artist, was one of the most important figures in South American architecture; he was also a member of the Grupo de los Trece. In the 1970s he began to focus on Conceptual art. He addressed urban and pollution issues in several new series based on infectious, deadly rodents: La peste en la ciudad (1977), La peste en Ceppaloni (1978), and Tendederos de la peste (1979). In addition to works of this nature, based on urban problems, Testa also produced others that were inspired by experiences, objects, and drawings from his childhood, such as Caperucita roja (1975), among others.
This newsletter published two of his sketches from the series La peste en la ciudad, in which he used past plagues and epidemics as metaphors for contemporary urban overcrowding and living conditions in cities, proof of the failure of the modernist project in Latin America. Inspired by historical events and memories of his childhood, Testa presented an environmental-social message that explained how hegemonies cause political catastrophes—the metaphor of “the plague” is the “natural” backlash of war. He thus depicts the horrors of the recent dictatorship in Argentina as metaphors.
In his commentary, Glusberg describes the environmental problem involved: “As an architect, Clorindo Testa has a feeling for 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—as well as other works by other members of the Grupo de los Trece—was part of the installation Signos en ecosistemas artificiales at the XIV São Paulo Biennial in October 1977, where it was awarded the Grande Prêmio Itamaraty. In the months prior to the biennial, the CAYC organized solo exhibitions for the members of the Grupo de los Trece. (GT-737, 738, 746, 757, 758, 759, 761, 764, 765, 766, 772, 773, 785, 786). On that occasion, the work that Testa showed was published in a different newsletter with the same text but written in Spanish. This version (written in Portuguese) was published by the CAYC in March of the following year, after the group won the grand prize.
