These are transcribed excerpts provided by the author, Julio Plaza, to the columnist Maria Silvia. In the document, Plaza declared that his work derived from reflecting on art as a language with an inherent system he defined as a metalanguage. He uses syncretism to modify the meaning of the works of art (by appropriation), commenting on the construction of new narratives on already created cultural products. He places himself in the post avant-garde, beyond the culture of the artistic object. His approach leans toward semiotics, denying subjective inspiration, such as the fusion between popular and scholarly iconography.

Julio Plaza was one of the principal artists involved in documenting the main multimedia strains in Brazilian art. In this text, the author revealed his ties to semiotic art and the artistic manipulation of language. The author’s solo exhibition was held at the Gabinete de Artes Gráficas in São Paulo in November 1975. The exhibition presented two silkscreen series: “comentários” and “didática,” the latter in collaboration with the artist and professor Regina Silveira, who eventually became his partner. Maria Silvia worked as an art journalist for the newspaper A Gazeta, published in São Paulo until the late 1970s.

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, to the idea of intersemiotic translation or the interpretation of verbal signs in 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)].