The artist, journalist, and theatre director Marco Antonio Ettedgui, in Hospitalización por cálculo renal, performed in Caracas, describes the action as a therapeutic experience of having a kidney stone. According to Ettedgui, the performance is presented sequentially on three consecutive days. The artist states that each day he recounts a different situation: before the hospitalization, during the hospitalization (and the supposed procedure), and how he got rid of the kidney stone. The action ends with a party to celebrate that, in reality, he was never operated on, and to also commemorate Father's Day.

Marco Antonio Ettedgui (1958–81) was an actor and theatre director, journalist, non-objectual artist, and organizer of performance events. He died tragically in 1981, during a theatrical production of Eclipse en la casa grande by Javier Vidal. The action Hospitalización por cálculo renal was part of the program for “Acciones frente a la Plaza”, an event held in Caracas, supported by FUNDARTE and organized by Ettedgui that same year. It was presented in the exhibition hall of the Gobernación del Distrito Federal on July 19, 21, and 29. The event was published in Acciones frente a la Plaza. Reseñas y documentos de siete eventos para una nueva lógica del arte venezolano, compiled by María Elena Ramos (Caracas: FUNDARTE, 1995), and in the bookEttedgui, arte-información para la comunidad (Caracas: Editorial Oxígeno, 1985). The actions Hospitalización por cálculo renal, Ensueño Criollo and La República de Venezuela me invitó a realizar una acción de nueva lógica en el hermano país de Colombia, arte informacional para la comunidad como asignatura are foundational works of Ettedgui’s performance art.

Hospitalización por cálculo renal is indispensable for interpreting Ettedgui’s art, as well as for the genre of non-objectual art in Venezuela, at the beginning of the 1980s. In the document, the artist describes his thesis of art as a communicative act aimed at the community, and not as a creative act that produces poignant effects and affects. In this manner, he proposes the politicization of the body; a body that presents struggles nearer to sociocultural matters than to traditional aesthetic values, including some actions typical of a happening, from the 1960s, with its aggressive postures toward spectators or to the body of artists. In this document he reflects on the audience as active subjects that imagine, in an individual manner, the action through the oral narration.

In Hospitalización por cálculo renal, and as a television emcee, Ettedgui presents different objects in the “scene”; among them, cotton balls, surgical instruments, hospital bedsheets and blankets, and a film about a medical procedure. At the same time, the artist offers gifts to the audience, while the scene is recorded by filmmaker Germán Carreño (in the manner of a news report) and ends the performance with a party singing and lip-syncing Caribbean melodies or making telephone calls to the parents of some of the audience members to congratulate them on their special day.