This is a manifesto by graphic artist Julio Plaza in which he proposes that art, as relating to time and space, be integrated in an objective way, into an open environment that reverberates with life. He declared that the invention of the “artistic object” was something detrimental to society and that traditional art should be sacrificed. He defended the collective work, modules, scientific approaches, and rationalizations that were functional and concrete. “The provisional” is what stands out in his proposal, in that art is the nexus to life, the nexus to evaluate light/color, and to integrate cinema, theater, and music. In his opinion, those were keys for a new humanism that encourages active, dynamic, and human intervention of the spectator. There was no pretense in presenting a dogmatic or methodical approach, but instead, a collective construction of a heterogeneous group that was open to criticism and controversy was proposed.

The so-called “pro-integration manifesto” by the Spanish graphic artist Julio Plaza, based in São Paulo, was written in Spanish in March 1967 before he finally settled in Brazil. It connected his artistic lineage with the tradition of Concrete Art and the utopian notion of integrated arts. It revealed an affinity to American Minimalism and the vision of the “Opera Aperta” [The Open Work] advocated by Umberto Eco. That same year, the author joined the ESDI (Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial) in Rio de Janeiro with a grant from the of Ministério das Relações Exteriores do Brasil.

The Spanish multimedia artist, professor, and theorist Julio Plaza (1938−2003) played a key role in Brazilian Conceptualism and electronic art. Additionally, in concert with the poet Augusto de Campos, Plaza is recognized for the graphic configuration of several concrete poems. They also produced artists’ books such as Poemóbiles in 1974 and the Caixa Preta in 1975. Plaza was a professor of multimedia art at the Instituto de Artes da Unicamp in Campinas, as well as a professor in the visual arts department at the ECA/USP [Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo]. He organized and laid the groundwork for the exhibition Arte pelo Telefone: Videotexto, held in São Paulo at the Museu da Imagem e do Somin 1982, and was placed in charge of the special multimedia exhibition hall of the seventeenth São Paulo Biennial in 1983, a singular moment in the country for electronic art. Plaza dedicated his doctoral thesis, later published as a book, on the idea of intersemiotic translation or the interpretation of verbal signs by means from which literary texts are transposed to both visual and auditory codes.

[For additional reading, please refer to the ICAA digital archive for the following texts by Julio Plaza: “77: quase-apresentação” (doc. no. 1110719), “Arte e interatividade: autor-obra-recepção” (doc. no. 1111093), “Arte e videotexto” (doc. no. 1111090), “Busca da dimensão mais firme para a realidade” (doc. no. 1110750), “Câmara obscura” (doc. no.  1110718), “Imagemega” (doc. no. 1111133), “Info foto: grafias” (doc. no. 1111091), “O livro como forma de arte (I)” (doc. no. 1111238), “O livro como forma de arte (II)” (doc. no. 1111239), “Mail Art: arte em sincronia” (doc. no. 1110592), “Nem oito, nem oitenta: oi, tô aí” (doc. no. 1111270), “Poéticas visuais” (doc. no. 1110587), and “Transcriar” (doc. no. 1111237)].