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. In addition to the exhibitions, a program of different activities provided viewers with a greater chance of seeing the latest innovations in art and scientific thought. According to Glusberg, the coordination between theoretical thinking and artistic practice was a key factor in the achievement of social change.
During the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, the CAYC became a cultural home for the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research), a space that welcomed a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires after the military takeover of the institution in what came to be known as “La Noche de los Bastones Largos” in June 1966. In its early years, the center organized multiple activities with intellectuals that led to the circulation of different disciplines (analytical philosophy, mathematical logic, epistemological problems, psychology, semiotics, and linguistics) that had been excluded in official circles.
Gregorio Klimovsky (1922–2009) began studying engineering at the UBA (Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1941), then switched his focus to mathematics. He also attended lectures on Bertrand Russell’s ideas, which led him to develop an interest in epistemological problems and the basis of scientific knowledge. He was one of the pioneers in Argentina of the introduction of mathematical logic and the axiomatic theory of sets. He also contributed to the epistemological foundation of psychoanalysis.
In 1966, after the fateful “La Noche de los Bastones Largos,” Klimovsky resigned from the UBA’s Faculties of Exact Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Philosophy and Letters. Once democracy was restored, in 1984, he returned to those institutions and became a member of the Comisión Nacional para la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP). (Alejandro Cassini, “Gregorio Klimovsky: 1922-2009” Revista latinoamericano de filosofía 35, no.2 (2009 ): 388–92.)
