The Keeper Project, produced by RED CHAIR, is a socially engaged live art project hosted in Caloundra on Gubbi Gubbi country in 2025.
RED CHAIR is a Sunshine Coast-based performing arts company passionate about live performance, storytelling and community.
Our community arts and socially engaged work (StoryPlace, People’s Orchestra, Dawn Awakening, ThePlaylist and The Keeper Project) is a contribution to the communities where we work and live. We are committed to using the arts as a connector to people to reduce barriers to civic participation and creative expression to enhance the quality of life in our regional areas. Through high quality participatory experiences, we bring creativity into the reach of everyone and raise the profile of an artist’s value within the community.
The Keeper Project is a socially engaged live art project hosted in Caloundra on Gubbi Gubbi country in 2025.
An immersive experience for the community, a group of eleven local artists drawn from diverse backgrounds and creative disciplines, become the archaeologists of local stories in the role of ‘Keeper’ – facilitating creative exchanges, offerings and connection between artists and the community and creating an experience that exists in a particular moment in space and time.
Each Keeper spends three weeks performing their own unique creative ritual in the public realm, drawing on their personal connections to place and their own artistic practices.
Everyday spaces are transformed over the 30 week duration of the project with one Keeper at a time contributing their own part to this playful ‘anomaly’ in the town. The project is inherently participatory, with audiences having agency over their level of interest and engagement with the project as they go about their everyday business.
The Keeper is for everyone – audiences for the project are those who incidentally encounter the Keepers ‘in place’, residents, visitors and workers of Caloundra, not just arts-loving audiences.
Keepers ‘in place’, residents, visitors and workers of Caloundra, not just arts-loving audiences. Previous iterations of the Keeper Project – Nambour (2024/25) and Coolum (2021/22) – have engaged over 1800 people, with over 98,000 witnessing the project during its roll-out in these communities.
Keepers are continually observing, documenting and weaving the embedded stories and interactions with the community into their live art practice creating visual logs, digital archives and recordings through artistic mediums.
The Keeper Project breaks down the access barriers to arts engagement and demystifies the role of artists in society. The public visibility of the Keepers becomes a way for people to connect via common experiences and stories and build a better understanding, civic pride and identity around the place they live, work and play.
In the Coolum pilot project in 2021-22, over 1000 people directly engaged with the project with over 54,000 witnessing the project during its roll-out in that community.
Click here to find out more about the Keeper Project.
RED CHAIR is a Sunshine Coast-based performing arts company passionate about live performance, storytelling and community.
Our community arts and socially engaged work (StoryPlace, People’s Orchestra, Dawn Awakening, ThePlaylist and The Keeper Project) is a contribution to the communities where we work and live. We are committed to using the arts as a connector to people to reduce barriers to civic participation and creative expression to enhance the quality of life in our regional areas. Through high quality participatory experiences, we bring creativity into the reach of everyone and raise the profile of an artist’s value within the community.
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