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. As part of the interdisciplinary approach it had always encouraged, the CAYC promoted experimental practices, appropriating a variety of examples of Argentine art from the 1960s.
In 1969, with its first exhibition, Arte y Cibernética (Art and Cybernetics), the CAYC established its experimental credentials, which were in line with ideas that had been presented on the international stage. The center hoped that this exhibition at the Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires would show what new technologies could do for creative activity.
The exhibition’s curatorial plan included electronic music composed by Dante Grela, Francisco Kröpfl, Carlos Rausch, Jorge Rotter, and Eduardo Tejeda. The center’s intention to combine disciplines was on display again in Argentina-Intermedios (Teatro Ópera, Buenos Aires, 1969), a show that included electronic music, performing arts, experimental films, and Kinetic sculptures.
Griselda Gambaro (b. 1928), an Argentine writer and playwright, started her career writing short stories and novels. One of her stories, El desatino (The Mistake), was adapted for the stage and performed at the Instituto Di Tella in 1965. Various groups who performed there approached the professional theater as a political practice that could bring about social change. In response to the repressive tactics of General Juan Carlos Onganía’s military dictatorship, she and her husband, the sculptor Juan Carlos Distéfano (b. 1933)—a graphic designer at the Di Tella at the time—opted for exile and moved to Barcelona in 1969. The dark mood in Argentina inspired Gambaro to write one of her best-known plays, El campo (The Camp, 1968), about the difficulties faced by an Argentine who wakes up to find himself in a Nazi concentration camp. This newsletter announces the group’s production of the play at the CAYC in March 1974.
In the text published in this newsletter, the group explained their aesthetic-anthropological approach, which was based on the performance of “rites” or “rituals” as a form of communion and communication between performers. Presenting the play in this way provided an opportunity to distance themselves from everyday routines and generate an extraordinary event. These rites were performed with a minimal reliance on props, inspired by Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) and his “poor theater” concept. His “Teatro Pobre”—using only the actors’ bodies and voices on an “empty” stage with no scenery—was a direct reference to performance art, an experimental movement that the CAYC promoted in the local art scene.
