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.
Julio Plaza (1938–2003) started his art training in Madrid in the 1950s, then went to Paris to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He arrived in Brazil in 1967 and took part in the IX Bienal Internacional de São Paulo as a member of the official Spanish delegation. He stayed on and enrolled at the ESDI Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (associated with the UERJ, Universidade Estadoal do Río de Janeiro), getting to know the Brazilian avant-garde through concrete poets in São Paulo. He produced poems written in that style and then, with Augusto de Campos (b. 1931), went on to create two volumes of poems that can be manipulated by the reader, the most well known of which were Poemóbiles (1974) and Caixa Preta (1975). The meticulous design of Augusto’s visual ideas allowed him to transform printed text into three-dimensional poetic objects.
Plaza also worked with the art historian Walter Zanini (1925–2013), who at that time was the director of the MAC USP (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo), to organize a couple emblematic exhibitions focused on the international networks that produced mail art: Prospectiva (1974) and Poéticas Visuais (1977). He started working with video in the 1980s. The underlying principle of his work was inter-semiotic translating, the subject of his doctoral thesis (ECA-USP) and the book that bears the same name. Plaza used this term to refer to the transposition of a piece (poem, print, or painting) to a different code (textual, visual, and/or sound) while keeping the ideas, structures, and functionality of the original work. As an academic, he was associated with the IEL-UNICamp (Instituto de Estudos de Linguagem da Universidade de Campinas) in the 1990s.
This was the first time Plaza showed his work at the CAYC, doing so at the same time as his then-wife (see GT-526 [doc. no. 1476849]), the Brazilian artist Regina Silveira (b. 1939). From that point on, Plaza became a regular at group events held at the center in Buenos Aires
