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.
Guillermo Deisler (1940–1995) was active in the Conceptual art scene in Chile during the 1960s. A noted graphic poet and editor, his creative output was driven by an artistic-political approach that sought to promote the creation of work-based networks among artists, encouraging the development of collaborative projects and the use of art to intervene in the public sphere. Deisler and the Argentinean Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997) developed a close professional and personal relationship, which began in 1966 when they started working as editors at the magazines Diagonal Cero and Mimbre, respectively. They both played important roles in the consolidation of the international mail art movement. The circulation of their plates (with postage stamps, postcards, envelopes, and rubber stamps) contributed to the spread of mail art among other contemporary artists in Argentina, Chile, and the rest of the world.
Deisler also took part in the Expo/Internacional de Novísima Poesía/69 (1969) at the Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, and the Expo Internacional de Proposiciones a Realizar–Investigaciones Poéticas (1971), organized by the CAYC and Vigo, who sought to collect examples of experimental poetry to demonstrate the existence of an extensive network. From then on, Deisler was a regular contributor to the activities sponsored by the center, where he found an environment that was compatible with his own discourse and works in terms of both his experimental interests and his commitment to the struggle for the political and economic freedom of Latin American countries.
Exiled in 1973 after the coup d’état that overthrew the constitutionally elected president, Salvador Allende, Deisler continued his intellectual and poetic pursuits in Europe, first in Bulgaria and then in Germany, where he lived until his death in 1995.
