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.
Going back to the CAYC’s very early years, showing films was an important part of the Center’s exhibition programs, in keeping with its goal of positioning itself as a space for experimental work, especially for projects that sought to combine art, technology, and communication. The CAYC thus continued doing the work that the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella had been doing in Argentina in the 1960s, motivating the avant-garde as it sought to explore the mass media and encouraging the use of interdisciplinary approaches; that is, visual artists who wanted to try their hands at radical theater, fashion, design, and film. In Glusberg’s view, collaborative works of that kind provided a way to promote a new social order.
Activities of this sort became a regular part of the CAYC’s programs in 1974, when Glusberg took part in Open Circuits. International Conference on the Future of Television, at MoMA in New York, and later with the Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video organized by the CAYC in Buenos Aires, London, Paris, Ferrara, Antwerp, Caracas, Barcelona, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo.
Florent Bex (b. 1937), the Director of the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum in Antwerp (from 1972 to 1981), was a regular participant in the various editions of the Encuentros, providing videos, taking part in group discussions, and making presentations at panels. From April to May 1974, the ICC hosted the exhibition Kunstsystemen in Latijn-Amerika [Systems Art in Latin America] (GT-354; doc. no. 1476507, GT-403; doc. no. 1476538), together with an event referred to as a Latin American Week, which was one of the forerunners of the Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video.
The press coverage of the Fifth Encuentro reflected the excellent reception it received among local media, which saw the event as an important step in the evolution of video art in Belgium. [Glenn Phillips and Sophia Serrano, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America, Getty Research Institute, 2023]. The CAYC and the ICC continued to work together and collaborated on the exhibition Arte belga de hoy [Belgian Art Today], presented in Argentina at the Museo Genaro Pérez in Córdoba in April-May 1976 (GT-612; doc. no. 1477158, GT-614; doc. no. 1477159) and at the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Rosa Galisteo de Rodríguez in Santa Fe, in July 1976 (GT-625; doc. no. 1477200).
