Rethinking Tools

With the tools and frameworks that the participants use in their on-field engagements, the field as a material and communal substrate becomes a carrier of socio-political changes in the agrarian sector while tracing and marking the changing relations and interdependencies between various species. The tools alongside the soil become a node, a knot, unravelling a series of networks that asks us to reconsider - What situations are tools generating and in turn, what is the nature of conditions generated by these tools and their changing production? Thinking through tools - both as physical and social agents, shaping ground-level realities, this section attempts to look at ways in which the soil inscribes itself on the community and how it gets acted on through various agents - both human and non-human.

A Toolbook Takes Shape

Through several conversations on and around tools as inseparable elements, objects and agents in the agrarian expanse, our participants began convening around how tools connected their practices through similitude and difference. Inspired by the images of tools being shared during our sessions and on our WhatsApp group, artist Gopa Roy began drawing the different tools she was encountering through the Forum.

Gopa proposed a model to generate information on tools, their materials, processes and shifting agencies by inviting participants into an exchange of sorts. As Gopa's practice incorporates the making of hand-made paper with different organic materials, she created a network of transmissions within the Agriforum by sending other participants small sheets of paper made from sugarcane, inviting them to draw and intervene on the surface of the same in any way they saw fit.

This exchange has led to the co-production of a tool-book as a way of collaborating through co-authoring and co-making, allowing for multiple approaches to emerge.

BERE Art Collective worked on this installation keeping the women vegetable sellers in mind. Installed along a roadside, the fence acts as a kiosk but also becomes more than a physical structure. Rather it transformed into a matrix of shared memory and connection. In a gathering that brought together the Bodo community as well as the children who helped build the installation, memory became a living, contested space — a terrain shaped by the tensions between erasure and resilience, loss and continuity.

Inspired by ecological patterns, the fence mirrors the cyclical rhythms of Dheer Beel. Just as the lake rises and falls with the monsoon and winter seasons, the landscape shifts; paddy fields submerged during monsoons reemerge as the water recedes in winter. This rhythm informed the collective’s work, drawing from Bodo vernacular architecture and imagery of agricultural tools central to the region’s practices, circulated over time by inhabitants who deeply revere the surrounding hills and the forest lands. Using synthetic nets layered over bamboo fences, the work reflects a transition from organic to industrial, tradition to transformation. Tools such as the spade, hand saw, and plough—visible through the hazy nets—become windows to a shared past, invoking memories and dialogues.