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. Activities of this sort became a regular part of the CAYC’s programs in 1974, when Glusberg took part in Open Circuits. An International Conference on the Future of Television, at MoMA in New York, and then in the Encuentros Internacionales de Video presented at the center in Buenos Aires and in London, Paris, Ferrara, Antwerp, Caracas, Barcelona, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo. One year earlier, Glusberg joined forces with Pedro Roth and Danilo Galasse to create Ediciones del Tercer Mundo (Third World Editions), a collective that promoted the production of Latin American publications and videos and organized festivals for non-commercial films. The term “non-commercial” was a reference to films that were shot on Single 8, Super 8, and 16 mm film by amateur filmmakers, as distinct from the 35 mm film used in commercial productions.
This newsletter announces the films that will be shown at the CAYC as part of Festival de Cine Experimental, which opened in April 1974 [see GT-325 (doc. no. 1476491), GT-394 (doc. no. 1476535)]. This particular festival took place every Friday, some of the films were shown free, and sometimes the filmmakers would attend and engage with the audience.
Horacio Vallereggio (b. 1945) would later join the Grupo Goethe—with Marie-Louise Alemann, Narcisa Hirsch, Silvestre Byrón, and others—a collective that was active in the experimental film world in the 1970s. The group set about rethinking not just the overall language of filmmaking but the production, exhibition, and distribution of their works as well. In keeping with the “Manifesto of the New American Cinema” (1962) championed by Jonas Mekas (among others), the group called for creative freedom, the use of smaller gauge film, and more modest production budgets than those required to finance commercial movie making.
