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 a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
In such a context the contact with Argentineans abroad working in institutions was significant. As noted in the newsletter, Susana Torre worked in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, where architect Emilio Ambasz, a fellow Argentine, was the curator. Moreover, in the same spirit of continental exchange, films were screened as a regular part of the CAYC’s exhibition schedule, in keeping with its goal of positioning itself as a space devoted to experimentation, especially when it involved the convergence of art, technology, and communications media. In such a way, these “artist films” were shown in a quite different manner of the commercial language of that industry. The CAYC thus functioned as a continuation of the ITDT (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella) in Buenos Aires, as the driving force behind the avant-garde that championed innovative approaches to the use of mass media and encouraged unexpected crossovers between disciplines. But Glusberg’s project went beyond what the ITDT was doing by seeking to promote a diverse center for collaboration, connecting artists and specialists from different scientific fields whose main goal was in pursuit of a radical attempt to generate contributions at a social level.
