As we’ve been working on our new house in Santa Fe, I’ve often wondered “how did this get here” — yesterday my husband looked at me quizically and said “why would some previous owner have run the water pipe that way?” If only houses could talk… I recently ran across the recycling: washi tales project, a set of performance pieces that let the paper talk — each piece tells the story of a sheet of Japanese handmade paper as it is recycled through time. They seem to want to explore how the old influences the new, and in their description of the performances they say “The Papermaker, an actor who speaks the local language of the audience, serves as narrator and guide as she creates something new from what she learns of the old. Washi Tales explores aesthetic and spiritual values of recycling, beyond practical environmental concerns, into the realms of history and the imagination.”
There’s lots more on their website, with the added bonus of a lovely set of photos on papermaking and washi.