Kimi Maeda is not one who throws things away easily. Her eye is always drawn toward an untapped possibility, a moment when the seemingly exhausted object will once again prove useful. In our disposable present, Maeda’s attention is often drawn to those objects, people, and communities who get left behind. Her new project, Ichi Oku House, re-situates her experimental-performance practice within the realm of the left-behind. In Japan’s remote Shimane Prefecture where she lives, she will be transforming an abandoned residence, known in Japanese as an akiya, into both the setting and the main character in a performance piece that interweaves her family’s history (in both Shimane and America) with stories from neighbors, friends, and Japanese folk tales. Tapping into the discourse of house tours, Maeda’s bilingual solo performance will integrate moments of object theater, shadow performance, and interactive light and sound installations throughout the house to explore the burden and blessing of memory and how our treatment of objects and spaces mirrors larger, transnational trends toward the abandonment of rural communities. In choosing to work on the scale of a house and its surrounding grounds, her intention is to create a piece that will age, transform, and possibly decay over many years. Embracing her tendency to continually tweak and adjust her performances, Ichi Oku House will evolve as community members, visiting artists, and audiences add their own memories, objects and movements to the space.