Drum Magazine Issue 5 | Page 33

DA505 main 26/7/05 7:03 pm Page 31 Drum: ARTWORKS 31 move the focus from physical attendance of events to virtual interaction, by opening up the website as the central focus, as a venue. This has given us an international profile from the beginning and a forum for real discussion and open debate. There are now more than a hundred partners delivering many, many hundreds of events all over the country, not just visual arts but in every art form. Today, the Africa 05 website gets up to which have a significantly different ethnic make-up – Africa Remix got 22,000 people using their Salon Afrique zone on the ballroom floor. And through fellowship and residency programmes we have managed to bring hundreds of African artists to animate programmes and create real relationships with galleries. The international interface to our work has helped us broker a number of key partnerships with governments and a significant amount of sponsorship and promotional partnership deals, including the BBC, Time Out and Starbucks – large organisations working together in ways that they had never previously conceived and doing it to deliver great art to diverse audiences. We are also hoping that we can make this “ There are hundreds of partners delivering many hundreds of events all over the country, not just visual arts but art in every form.” 65,000 hits a week and the participant-facing pages of the website have had over 45,000 hits from people across the world interested in partnership. The exhibitions, such as Africa Remix at the Hayward, or Depth of Field at the South London Gallery are getting audience figures that are similar to their regular audiences, but more than a season, more than a year; this needs to be the beginning of an ongoing commitment to a more inclusive, democratic and collaborative future that puts audience engagement and partnership up there as priorities along with scholarship and curation. Each element of the programme poses a set of questions for the host institution. How do they continue to engage and sustain this energy? Each organisation has come up with a particular set of aims, but every partner is linked by commitment to harness this energy and move forward in the spirit of change.