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.
Seeking to position itself as a center for experimentation—especially at the point where art, technology, and communication overlapped to create a new social reality—the CAYC promoted a variety of initiatives devoted to photography and amateur filmmaking. In this endeavor, the center partnered with Fotografía Universal, a magazine directed by Miguel Ángel Otero (b. 1945), who introduced Argentina to a semiotic approach to the interpretation of photography. The magazine provided space for a debate about the scope of photography, its future, and its acknowledgement at an institutional level (Daniel Merle, “Procesos forzados. Experimentación técnica y fotografía documental en Argentina entre 1967 y 1972,” unpublished). Otero’s partnership with the CAYC in this venture was based on a shared interest in a kind of photography that could present a militant view of the country’s social and political situation.
Otero and Glusberg promoted the Festival de formatos no comerciales, a direct forerunner to the Encuentros Abiertos Internacionales de Video (see GT-200; doc. no. 1476371, GT-291; doc. no. 1476439, GT-292; doc. no. 147644).
Otero later became the director of Diafragma, a magazine that reported the latest news in the fields of Argentinean and Latin American photography and film. After the appearance of the magazine’s first and only issue, Otero contributed to El Descamisado, a leftist Peronist publication, and was in charge of the photography team at the newspaper Noticias until it closed in November 1974.
The term “Contrainformación” (Counterinformation) was used quite widely in political circles in those days (under an authoritarian government) to refer to the influence of the hegemonic media. In the combative and unconventional art field the term was used by the Tucumán Arde group (Rosario and Buenos Aires, 1968), among others.
