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.
In 1974 the CAYC began focusing a great deal of its attention on this project, promoting a variety of initiatives in a contemporary circuit of new cultural spaces and centers that were emerging in Europe at the time. The exhibition Arte de sistemas en Latinoamérica toured several European cities from 1974 to 1976, providing an overview of recent works from the region that reflected “arte de sistemas.” As part of the campaign to promote the third edition of this exhibition at the ICA in London, this newsletter announces one of the activities scheduled to take place during the Semana Latinoamericana. The newsletter introduces the Grupo de Teatro del Encuentro, a theater group that was part of the CAYC’s activities in 1973–74. The group was directed by Alejo Piovano (b. 1944), the Argentinean theater director and playwright, whose first play, Apocaliptosis, was performed at the Centro de Experimentación Audiovisual at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in 1967. The group—whose members included Graciela Gerez, Daniel Santos, Giorgio Knapp, and Daniel Salvatierra—was variously influenced by political and experimental theater; their goal was to create works that wove actors’ bodies and words into productions that reclaimed a ritual quality.
With their discussions on the region’s art and presentations of dance, music, performance art, theater, and film, this initiative worked to promote the experimental nature of the CAYC in particular, and Argentinean and Latin American art in general. It should be noted that Arte de Sistemas en Latinoamérica established Arte de sistemas as a movement that positioned the CAYC as the institutional focal point for the exposure and promotion of Latin American Conceptualism.
