The events were organized and executed by a group of artists that included María Teresa Gramuglio, Nicolás Rosa, Juan Pablo Renzi, León Ferrari, Roberto Jacoby, Norberto Puzzolo, and Graciela Carnevale.
Out of the twenty-three Argentine provinces, it ranked sixth in production but sixteenth in literacy, fifteenth in infant mortality and thirteenth in school retention.
Juan Carlos Onganía, the head of the dictatorship chose the province as a place to represent the stability of his governmental policies.
The government publicized a fictional industrialization plan and promoted the slogan “Tucuman, the Garden of the Republic” accompanied by paradisal posters of the province.
With the help of sociologists, economists, journalists, and photographers, the group decided to start an operation of “counter-information” to counteract the government’s publicity about Tucumán and to reveal the real condition of the province.
The denunciation-exhibition was held to reveal the profound contradictions caused by the economic-political system based on hunger and unemployment and the creation of a false cultural superstructure.
All the documented material from the trip was used in a montage of audio-visual media, including oral information to the public on the part of the artists, intellectuals and specialists who participated in the investigation.
The exhibits included collected interviews with the people about living conditions in Tucuman, mural photographs, and research about the accumulation of wealth by the richer families.
[3] After Tucumán Arde , police and army repression increased and most of the artists who had been involved in the project stopped producing art for several years.
Although Tucumán Arde was designed to affect the exploited people, who were supposed to become coauthors a change the course of the story, its main impact was on the elite which included artists who defined themselves as part of Avant-Garde.