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 a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
The CAYC was involved in the Encuentro Internacional de Arte de Pamplona (1972), which was considered the largest and most significant international avant-garde art festival to have taken place in Spain at the time, while the country was still under General Franco’s authoritarian rule. Following that event, this newsletter announced that the center based in Buenos Aires would attend the symposium that had been called to organize and plan the experimental art festival Berlin Workshop 74. This gathering would provide yet another opportunity for the CAYC to position itself as the focal point for the exposure and promotion of modern art practices in Latin America.
As encouraged by the Greek art theorist and curator Christos M. Joachimides (1932–2017), who was closely associated with the CAYC, the newsletter announced the timeline that was proposed in Buenos Aires for discussions concerning the organization and planning for the festival, a project that would include an “international forum at which participants could present, discuss, and compare activities within the field of the visual arts.” Taking note of the resounding failure associated with traditional biennials—for economic, political, or aesthetic reasons—this festival was promoted as an ideal scenario for the presentation of an art of ideas and for interdisciplinary practices that were being explored at the time. In order to secure Argentina’s involvement in the project, Glusberg invited all interested parties to an open meeting at the CAYC. This tactic was, in fact, a sort of harbinger of the organizational model he would use to promote the Jornadas Internacionales de la Crítica some years later when he was president of the Asociación de Críticos de la Argentina y la Internacional.