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. In addition to the exhibitions, a program of different activities exposed attendees to the latest in scientific thinking. According to Glusberg, the coordination between theoretical thinking and artistic practice was an essential part of social change.
During the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, the CAYC became a cultural home for the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research), a space that welcomed a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires after the military takeover of the university in what came to be known as “La Noche de los Bastones Largos” (The Night of the Long Sticks) in June 1966.
In its early years the center organized a variety of activities with intellectuals that contributed to the circulation of ideas from different disciplines (analytic philosophy, mathematical logic, epistemological problems, psychology, semiotics, and linguistics), which had been excluded from official circles after the military coup d’état mentioned above.
The Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico (SADAF) was one of the civil associations that welcomed university professors who had resigned their positions after the military takeover of universities. Following the model of the American Philosophical Society, the SADAF set out to organize groups and events devoted to the discussion and exposure of philosophical analysis. Its original list of members included Eugenio Bulygin, Genaro Carrió, Alberto Coffa, Juan Carlos D’Alessio, Rolando García, Ricardo Gómez, Gregorio Klimovsky, Raúl Orayen, Eduardo Rabossi, Félix Schuster, and Thomas Moro Simpson.
This newsletter announces the course, “Una historia de la literatura argentina” to be presented at the EAE by Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) in September through October 1974. Borges—who was already widely regarded as one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century—had been the director of the National Library from 1955 to 1973 when a new Peronist government relieved him of his duties. The CAYC organized an event titled “6 noches con Jorge Luis Borges” (6 Nights with Jorge Luis Borges), an allusion to the book 7 conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1974), at which the writer would share his vision of Argentine literature. He did so, perhaps reluctantly, since during the dictatorship all discussions about the role of art and the artist were overshadowed by political considerations concerning societal changes at the national and regional level.
