ARTERIAL NETWORK MEDIA STATEMENT

Arterial Network celebrates its fifth anniversary

Arterial Network, a Pan African network of artists, cultural activists, creative enterprises and others engaged in the African creative sector, today celebrates its fifth anniversary since its founding conference on Goree Island, Senegal in March 2007. Under the banner “Revitalising Africa’s Cultural Assets”, delegates from 14 African countries at the conference identified the lack of information, poor government policy and institutional frameworks, weak civil society structures, the marginalisation of artists and the arts, an absence of funding and a dearth of leadership as among the key challenges confronting the African creative sector.

Rather than depend on their respective governments, it was agreed that arts practitioners, arts managers and all those who were involved in and sought to make their living within the African creative sector, would take responsibility for themselves and their livelihood. Thus was born Arterial Network, a civil society network owned, directed and managed by African creative practitioners, arts administrators and cultural entrepreneurs.
With the support of international partners such as DOEN Foundation, HIVOS, Mimeta Foundation, the European Union, Africalia, the Commonwealth Foundation, Goethe Institute and British Council as well as Spier, a South African company providing support to its continental secretariat in Cape Town, Arterial Network has been able to respond to many of the challenges identified at its founding conference.

These responses include developing a cultural policy template for countries to apply to their respective conditions, as is being done in Egypt currently with the formulation of their post-Mubarak cultural policy; keeping more than 8000 stakeholders across the continent and internationally informed and networking such stakeholders through a monthly newsletter; providing information about the arts through a dedicated website www.artsinafrica.com; training leadership and building capacity through toolkits in project management, fundraising, advocacy and arts marketing; undertaking research and preparing policy positions on the creative economy, culture and development and cultural diversity from African perspectives; representing African civil society positions in international forums such as UNESCO; hosting continental competitions in playwriting and poetry to identify new talent and project African creative works into the international arena; building civil society structures in more than 30 African countries to advance the interests of the creative sector within those countries, and mapping the state of freedom of creative expression across the continent.
“After a period of exciting and rapid growth, the next few years will be about consolidating the national chapters of Arterial Network,” said Mike Van Graan, the Arterial Network Secretary General. “These chapters will be the primary means to change the working conditions and to deliver real and substantial benefits to artists on the ground”, he said.
Van Graan said that while the creative sector should use the occasion to celebrate the growth and impact of Arterial Network, they should also renew their commitment to meeting the numerous challenges that still face the sector in its quest to develop the arts in their own right, but also as means to contribute to the eradication of poverty, to human rights and to democracy on the continent.
“I would like to encourage our members, staff and leadership to continue to take ownership of Arterial Network as this is the vehicle that we have created to advance and defend our interests. And I would like most sincerely to thank our international and local partners who have worked with us in helping to make our vision a reality”, he said