Seedpod is Punctum’s funded regional live arts residency program.

Seedpod residencies in 2024 are produced in association with the City of Ballarat – Creative City. They offer an opportunity for live arts and contemporary performance artists to investigate and develop new work.

Punctum and the City of Ballarat acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the unceded land on which Punctum’s Seedpod residencies take place, the Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung People.  

Punctum’s Seedpod residencies generate arts practice and development opportunities for creators of live arts & contemporary performance.

Through Seedpod we offer the right conditions and relationships for artists to grow their practice in a responsive, rigorous setting of enquiry, experimentation, and collaboration.
It provides a safe context of open, considered dialogue with colleagues, technicians, audiences, reviewers, and producers. It opens doors to creators seeking a testing phase to encourage exchange with audiences, creating the stimulus needed for deepening practice, innovation, and understanding ‘next steps’.  In this way we contribute to regional ecologies of practice.

Our 2024 Seedpod residencies offer artists who live, work or study in the city of Ballarat the time, funding, resources, and space to test ideas, push the boundaries of their creative practice, and understand how their work makes meaning with members of the public. In 2024 Seedpod artists are investigating the field of ‘contested sites’.

A contested site is where competing meanings can be found and interpreted. It may be a public space, a place, a building, a body, an object, a way of working, a symbol. It could be historically understood as a contested site, one which currently ‘holds’ contestation, or one that through a future lens may well become contested. The fissures, fault lines and tensions of these contested sites might be cultural, social, historical and/or environmental.    

A contested site includes but is not limited to:  

• Cultural and historical sites that are associated with different narratives, memories, or identities of different communities.  
• Natural and environmental sites that are affected by different interests, policies, or practices of different stakeholders.  
• Public spaces and social sites that are shaped by different forms of power, inequality, or resistance.   
• Objects when they are seen as a symbol of heritage, culture, or power.  
• Symbols when they are seen as a representation of meaning, emotion, or action.  
• Ways of working when they are seen as a reflection of values, norms, or practices. 
• Bodies when they are seen as markers of identity, difference, or belonging.

In 2024 there was an open call out and two Seedpod residencies were selected by a panel of artists, arts workers and former Seedpod recipients.

Artists Sandra Minchin and John Kachoyan were selected.

Seedpod artists offer a public sharing of their exploration as a way of testing and understanding how their proposition works. 

Each Seedpod residency offers:

• $3000 for artist fee, project materials, accommodation, travel  
• $2,000 in-kind producing, production management, some technical support (subject to availability)    
• $500 in-kind professional marketing and box office coordination   
• $500 in-kind dramaturgical/mentoring support
• $500 in-kind documentation/review writing   
• One week of in-kind access to meeting rooms and one week of in-kind access to studio space in the City of Ballarat equipped for research, development, rehearsal, meetings and access to presentation sites  
• Support to appropriately engage with Traditional Custodians