“i_CAN” (International Contemporary Art Network Association) is an international network registered in Netherlands as public financing organization. Its main goal is to create and support a collaboration structure in the field of contemporary visual arts and culture involving artists, critics, curators and administrations from Central Eastern Europe. It promotes information’s changes among the member countries, among them and other countries, the active partecipation to the questions about contemporary art, the promotion and pursuit of funds for the artistic activity of the countries from Central Eastern Europe. “i_CAN” c/o Geurt Imanse, Chief Curator, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

“i_CAN” was created in 1999 in Budapest as a reaction to the George Soros’ will about cutting off his grants to the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art. Since its registration in Amsterdam as International Contemporary Art Network it has always been a no profit organization, such as a post Soros network that fits new circumstances. Almost all the member countries were at that time in the transformation from Soros’ structure into indipendent organizations and this process has created a big net of contacts among institutions of cities as Skopje, Prague, San Petersbourg.
Variety of the characters involved in this iniziative makes you see how different are the geopolitical and ideological coordinates within the network, and how they undermine its equilibrium. Infact today we see some breaks in the old Central Eastern Europe, because some countries are going to join European Union and others are trying to modernize themselves to join it as soon as possible. So it’s not difficult to understand how the changing of prospects makes change “i_CAN” goals and mission too. The situation is almost schizofrenic because the strenght of these Central Eastern Europe’s countries lies in their glorious past but on the other hand they don’t want to be considered as the remains of Soros’ initiative or as the successors of the Soviet Empire. And to escape from that we decided to concentrate the energies of this network for the web site that represents an extreme art source for Central Eastern Europe.
“i_CAN” wants to be a public platform that promotes activities of the network itself but also activities of the individual members respecting their geopolitical context. The importance of comunications and exchanges in the web for the countries of the network consolidated when the twenty centers for contemporary art created by Soros and distributed in eighteen countries started to develop their politics following local needs and leaving a common way.
“i_CAN” is something new because it approachs contemporary art and the social political situation in a critical way. At the moment the web site uses the structure of a normal art and culture’s network but the Soros Foundation’s support is still irreplaceable and so it needs external grants. The situation of many countries from Central Eastern Europe is still very far from a social, political, economic normalization.
The main reason for the idea of “i_CAN” is to create a common platform to work and introduce the members to the possible financiers as a group. The center was registered in Amsterdam to be legitimized by the European Community and it obtained the support of the Cultural European Foundation. But it’s still difficult to delete the memory of beeing a Soros institution, whose activities created internal fights in some of those countries, and to propose a new image. The positive things from the Soros’ period are the contacts with most of the institutions that used to get money from the foundations: documentation, practical resources become something to share and improve.
We intended the web site as the space for the reciprocal communications. The editor Alenka Pirman gets the information from each member and she places it to create an up-to-date site for proposals and initiatives. Among these activities just recently we opened “Art work of the mouth” that wants to promote very young artists presenting their works on the web, and we’d like to put on the site also a big collection of critical books coming from different countries so they could be consulted by researchers and curators. Not to make the same mistakes of the past, when each country worked by itself, we focus now on the best instrument, the web site “i_CAN”, a common place in which all the information are shared by the network’s members.