Rethinking Tools

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.

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 relation and interdependencies between various species.

The tools alongside the soil becomes 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?

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.