Partnership Projects

keeper project nambour road crossing image by linda storee smith

The Keeper Project – Nambour 2024

The Keeper Project, produced by RED CHAIR, is a socially engaged live art project hosted in Nambour/Namba on Gubbi Gubbi country in 2024.

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 Nambour/Namba on Gubbi Gubbi country in 2024.

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 Nambour, not just arts-loving audiences.

keeper project nambour wall crossing image by linda storee smith

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.


How to Donate:

Choose your amount, make the transfer using the details below, and we’ll take care of everything else!

We currently accept donations by electronic transfer only.

Please use the following bank details:

Sunshine Coast Arts Foundation Ltd

BSB: 633 000

Account number: 169 034 485

(IMPORTANT! Please put the name of the partner that you are donating to and your email address in the reference line.)

You’ll receive an email confirmation and a tax receipt to claim your deduction.