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From Cultural Narratives to Social Structure: A Qualitative Structural Analysis of the Soros Network in Croatia

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and describe the networking practices that ensued from the network of Soros foundations in Croatia, by way of conceptualising them as “netdoms” (White, 2008), in which common aesthetic, political and social meanings are shared. The Soros Network here refers to the Soros’ Open Society Institute and a number of its spin-offs, such as the SCCA-Zagreb or CDU. Although these programmes have served to build or maintain the cultural infrastructure, encouraged the international careers of many artists, and helped to create conditions for contemporary critical artistic practices, Soros’ presence in Croatia was critiqued by some of his beneficiaries for introducing neoliberal values along with new structures. This paper describes how the Croatian cultural workers see the structure of this network, its main actors and the quality and dynamics of its ties, as well as what kind of values were disseminated through the network and how they influenced the contemporary art scene in Croatia. The analysis is conducted on 30 semi- structured narrative interviews with key protagonists of the Croatian art scene of the 1990s (conducted between 2015 and 2018), in which they reflected on their own networking practices, important actors, projects or places of networking or ways in which the socio- political context affected networking practices. This qualitative analysis of interviews is complemented with network visualisations of the Soros network, based on the data gathered through interviews and additional history of art research, and analysed with the help of social network analysis.

network analysis ; qualitative structural analysis ; Soros foundation ; art scene

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