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 space for experimentation—especially at the point where art, technology, and communication overlapped to create a new social reality—the CAYC worked with Miguel Ángel Otero to promote a variety of initiatives devoted to photography and amateur filmmaking.
Otero (b. 1945) introduced Argentina to a semiotic approach to the interpretation of photography. He was the director of Fotografía Universal, a magazine that provided space for a debate about the scope of photography, its future, and its acknowledgement at an institutional level. This newsletter announces the publication of the first issue of Diafragma, a magazine devoted to photography and film in Argentina and throughout South America. After the first and only issue of this magazine was published, Otero worked at El Descamisado, which was published by the Peronist left. He was also in charge of the newspaper Noticias's photographic equipment until it was shut down in November 1974.
Otero and Glusberg promoted the exhibition Contrainformación (GT-206; doc. no. 1478192) and 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. 1476440]). 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.
