Re: Syndicate: "why & how" to exhibit net art?

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

dear igor,

just for the record. you wrote:

>there is never enough money, of course. if george soros (no matter how
>we critique him) wouldn't finance our work there wouldn't be any
>nettime and syndicate meetings, there wouldn't be many net art
>festivals and exhibitions etc.

although uncle george is clearly playing an important role, this is a bit
exaggerated. there have been several syndicate and nettime meetings that
did not rely on soros funding with only some participants receiving travel
grants; the Deep Europe workshop in Kassel last year didn't have any
support from any soros body-parts what-so-ever, a fact that was greeted
with much surprise at the time.

in this context, it may be worth refering back to one of the Suggestions
towards a European Media Policy which we formulated in kassel:

10. Help Soros!

We also propose a help programme for the Soros Foundations in Eastern
Europe. This is only partly meant ironically. The wide-ranging dominance of
the Soros Foundations and SCCAs in the field of cultural sponsorship is not
so much a result of Soros' expansionism, but of the lack of action on the
part of other potential, large funding bodies. If the European Union or
some of its member states had developed equivalent, distributed networks of
local and regional offices that offer substantial support in a variety of
fields, then artists and cultural practitioners in Eastern Europe would not
be so exclusively dependent on support from the Soros Foundations. The
changes which are to be expected within the Soros network (like a growing
financial independence of the SCCAs from the New York office and the likely
need for them to raise funds from other sources) will make it necessary for
alternative, strong funding bodies to emerge, public and private, local,
national and international. We suggest that the Council of Europe and the
EU should engage in this process and support existing and successful
cultural infrastructures in the governmental as well as the
non-governmental sector.


i guess that a lesson to be learned from this is that we have to strive for
diversity in the funding sources that we tap into, and to avoid dependency
on a single source. but i'm sure that there will be people in the SCCA
network who have more explicit ideas about this, given that they are
currently forced to look for non-soros support.

greetings from sunny rotterdam (really!),

-a