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 world scene 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. The CAYC thus continued doing the work that the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella had been doing in Argentina in the 1960s, motivating the avant-garde as it engaged with the logic of the mass media, encouraging an exploration of interdisciplinary approaches, and supporting visual artists who were trying their hands in the fields of radical theater, fashion, design, and film. In Glusberg’s view, collaborative works of that kind provided a way to promote a new social order.
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.
While the first three “encuentros” (events) took place in European cities, where video art was already a well-established practice, the IV Encuentro was held in Buenos Aires in order to put Argentina—and, by extension, the rest of Latin America—in touch with the latest innovations and major figures working in this field, which was still in its infancy in our continent (see GT-521 [doc. no. 1476843]).
After studying set design at the Accademia di Brera (in Milan) in the early 1960s, Fernando De Filippi (b. 1940) embarked on a long career in a variety of fields that included painting, photography, printmaking, video, performance art, and installation. He started out being aligned with the Informalist movement but, in the early 1970s, his work changed radically to focus on the complex relationship between identity and ideology. During that period, he produced Sustituzione (Substitution), a work filmed on Super 8 in which he gradually alters his appearance and ends up looking like Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), the leader of the Soviet revolution.
