Arts and Media Access Centre

Acronym: AMAC. A non-governmental and non-profit community arts and media centre based in Cape Town, which provides access for under-resourced individuals and community organisations to training and production opportunities in the media and arts disciplines.

Founded in 2002 as a joint project by the Community Arts Project (CAP) and MediaWorks (which had derived from CAP in 1996), when the two organisations made a decision to join forces to form a Media and Arts Access Centre, based in Cape Town’s inner-city central improvement district. It unfortunagtely had to close down in 2008 due to lack of funding.

Mediaworks and CAP had emerged out of the oppositional arts and media movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and hence share a common vision to empower marginalized communities through art, drama and the media. The joint centre aims at serving marginalized communities by offering a range of services cutting across the related arts and media disciplines. These include: Education and training, including hands-on production experience and media literacy/cultural studies; access to facilities and ongoing mentorship in order to facilitate media and arts production and income generation for graduates; support services, including technical and organizational development; job and internship placements and career development counseling; professional communications services to NGO’s, Government and the private sector, including, graphic design, copywriting and editing, web page development, print management and communications consultancy services.

The physical address was 16 Harrington Street, Cape Town 8001. and the co-directors were Graham Falken and Karen Thorne (E-Mail : karen@mediawks.co.za; graham.cap@mediawks.co.za)

A full description of AMAC and its activities still appears on the the It utilises the ARTfactories/Autre(s)pARTs website [1], since they were members of the association.