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 the early 1960s, the Uruguayan artist Jorge Caraballo (1941–2014) was exploring Kinetic art; he was interested in aesthetic works that encourage the viewer’s interaction. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was active in the Conceptual art scene in Uruguay, together with Haroldo González (b. 1941), Clemente Padín (b. 1939), and Teresa Vila (1931–2009). These artists were all working in a variety of different fields, including visual art, independent theater, poetry, newspaper graphic art, and handcrafts.
Through nontraditional practices such as audiovisuals—which usually consisted of slide shows, installations, visual poetry, artists’ books, and, in particular, mail art—these artists created a network of European, North American, and Latin American artists who shared works and ideas among themselves. Following the imposition of a military dictatorship in Uruguay (1973–85), these networks began to share more than art and became a conduit used to condemn the campaigns of state-sponsored terrorism that were targeting the civilian population. This was an initiative that soon affected the entire Southern Cone of Latin America through what was called Operation Condor, a strategy directed by the United States CIA.
Violent attacks on freedom of expression and association, political censorship, and repression (constant surveillance, persecution, forced exile, and disappearances) became the main subject of Caraballo’s work, as can be seen in the image and text that were used to announce his presentation in Buenos Aires a few months after the imposition of the dictatorship in Uruguay, and just days after the coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende in Chile (September 11, 1973). The stated goal of these works was to shock viewers into changing their behavior.