Retailles is the French word for off-cuts, the residual fabric from the act of crafting something else. At the core of Atelier Retailles’ mission lies the conviction that cast-off material is still useful material. Parallel to our mission of research and exploration of papermaking’s limits and possibilities, we aim to reduce and reuse our resources: time, water, pulp, raw materials, and human labor. To that end, we accumulate residual pulp everywhere in the studio. The walls, the ceilings, the beater’s exterior, the bottom of every drawer accumulates surplus from every project and production undertaken by our team.

Twice a year, we excavate the accumulation, clean it thoroughly, and amass as much material that can be found to make one blend that holds the traces of six months of papermaking. We peel off the layers of pulp, which—not unlike sedimentary rock—reveal the chronology of the studio’s activities.

The sheets resulting from that production encapsulate the projects, the people, the energy of the past months. They are a pin dropped on the studio’s timeline, a conceptual archive. Retailles de Retailles plays on the words as much as on the idea of restoring value to discarded materials, an idea that is at the essence of what Retailles stands for.

Each edition of Retailles de Retailles reveals something surprising and impossible to repeat.

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