Vaissnavi Shukl
Toolshed is a platform, a project and a place in Hudson, New York, where artists Susannah Saylor and Edward Morris collect and share tools for ecological living. They’ve categorized these tools into four distinct groups, food, Kin, shelter and magic. Today we talk about kinship and shelter, and because I couldn’t help myself, magic. With the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we speak to Susannah and Edward about what ecological living means and how tool shed fits into that. We also talk in detail about the tool shed exchange, a Tool Lending Library that fosters kinship, creates a sense of ownership and builds a self supporting community.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl, and this is Architecture Off-Centre. A podcast where we highlight contemporary discourses that shape the built environment but do not occupy the center stage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

I’m going to start with your logo today. And the Toolshed logo is a line drawing a silhouette of what kids draw as a house or a home, and within that is another home, and it’s a home within a home within a home. Can you talk a little bit about the logo of the tool shed and lead us into the story behind Toolshed?

Edward Morris
Yeah, sure. So the logo, we should give credit where credit is due, that was designed by a woman we work with a lot, named Jill Peterson. And the logo is, as you just described, a home within a home within a home within a home. And the idea is that there’s sort of this infinite regress of homes, and that image captures an idea of ecology that we have, that we’ll, I think, discuss at length, probably in this interview. Essentially, it captures the idea that ecology is all about relations, and that there’s no single situated home that’s a firm boundary against all other places. But we’ll return to that in more detail in a sec. I think let’s, let’s maybe get into the story of how Toolshed developed and come back to these more complicated ideas of ecology if you really want to express it with the project.

Susannah Sayler
So Ed and I are artists. We primarily work with lens based media and also do some installation work as well. And for most of our career, we’ve worked exclusively on issues around ecology and the ecological crisis that we’re facing. And in addition to working as artists, we’ve always had a sort of side. It’s not a side, but a joint project with socially engaged work and platform building. So when we started, we initiated a project called The Canary Project, and that it was art and media to deepen public understanding of climate change, and it was really a collective. We worked with hundreds of artists and designers and educators and developed projects across many different media that were really about messaging and warning about climate change at a time when there was not as broad an understanding of the science as there is now. And so I guess about five years ago, we started feeling like it was time to evolve from that metaphor of ‘the canary in the coal mine’, that metaphor of warning and working as artists and with artists other artists and makers around that initiative to something that was more focused on local ecologies and it, you know, it was. It took a couple years, this evolution from the previous work as Canary. It was a 10 year project, but that’s sort of background, or the history that led us to is to establish ToolShed.

Edward Morris
Yes, so you want to hear more about the logo. I promised that in the beginning. Well, just because I think there’s a lot more to explain in terms of the word ecology. I think the word ecology is, it’s one of these words that you hear all the time, and it’s enjoying a Vogue at the moment, and there’s words getting to get exhausted a little bit. So I would love to refresh the word a little bit by going back to its roots. So as many people may know, ecology is built out of two words in Greek. One is ‘oikos’, which literally means home. It’s the same root that we have in the economy. And the other part of the root is logos. Logos is a very interesting word. It can mean work, literally word, or it can mean kind of inner logic, or in the Christian tradition, divine reason for something. But all together, kind of means language. So ecology means the language of home, but, and that’s why we’re talking about homes within homes within homes. But then when you think about what actually a home could be, I think it’s important to or at least we think about ecology from two main kinds of intellectual threads, call them. One is the thread of Umwelt. Umwelt is a concept, if I think of von Uexküll, an early German biologist, that, again, is getting a lot of currency in the culture right now, most prominently with a book by Ed Yong called ‘An Immense World’. I think, is a contemporary book that picks this concept up in a really accessible way. But the Umwelt is literally the environment of a particular being. And the most famous example he gives is of a tick. This Uexküll gives this example of a tick which has the entire world of a tick limited to three things, heat, light, and a sense of the citric acid, whatever that is blood. But without those three things, the tick doesn’t move once those three things, when any one of those three things are activated, and the tick moves in certain ways, right? And the point being is that as you work through different species in the world, each has its own Umwelt. It’s sensing different things, reacting to different things, and perceiving the world in different ways. The world in different ways. And so once you start thinking in this way, you realize that the fly is buzzing around your house and the dog you have as a pet isn’t perceiving the same home in the same way, right? And you can even extend that into humans, like the way Susannah perceives the home is not exactly the same way as I perceive the home. So that’s why there’s these homes within a home, within a home. The other key concept for us that I think extends this idea of Umwelt beyond the biological world is Felix Guattari’s concept of Three Ecologies. So Guattari took this word ecology, understood its relevance back in 1989 when he published the book and understood that there were three registers for ecology. There’s the natural ecology, what we normally think of like when people hear the word ecology, they normally think of like frogs and fishes or some kind of diagram that they dimly remember from some class in grade school with arrows and things cycling around like a hydraulic hydrology cycle or something. But he applies that same concept of ecology to not only the natural world, but socialites. And then, I think most interestingly, mental ecologies. So the way that different ideas exist within the head. So we took that idea very much to heart with Toolshed, when we started thinking about ecology and how we could gather and share tools for living, ecologically living, ecologically means something different in those three registers.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And because you.. Sorry, go ahead. Susannah.

Susannah Sayler
I guess I just wanted to add to that in terms of like a transformation or an evolution of human beings Umwelt, this condition of at least in the Western world, the human Umwelt is being highly developed as a defense against the Umwelts of other creatures, You know, and in everything from the structures we build, which are not very porous, to the way that we regard the natural environment as a kind of other wild place or pristine place, or a place to be protected, or, you know, place that we aren’t necessarily situated in as part of an inter integral to. So in thinking about the framework of Toolshed, certainly trying to make a shift, a cultural shift in how we message around its ideas of human wealth and our broader ecology that connects to other non-human beings.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So before we get a little deeper into Toolshed, since you’ve touched upon a lot of theoretical frameworks, I was wondering how, or you know, how one can think about ecology in relation to the idea of environment. So while a particular ecology exists within a certain environment. It might not necessarily be too vice versa. I’m just trying to think about it more from a systems thinking perspective, where ecology, when you think about it, is something that always, as you said, has a certain kind of relationship going on. In that framework of thinking about relationships and ecology, where do you think about the environment? And that doesn’t have to do, of course, with a natural environment, but you mentioned the social ecology, the mental ecology, and where does the idea, the very broad idea of environment, fall into?

Edward Morris
Well, an environment. When you speak of an environment, you speak of an envelope. Essentially, you’re talking about a certain area. And just as with ecology, we don’t think about there being one single ecology. There’s not one single environment, right? The word environment as a general term is almost meaningless. In a way, when people talk about environmentalism or caring about the environment. It’s hard to understand what that actually means when you think about it, because a singular environment, as we just said, the environment of the chick, is very different from the environment of the human being or the human but there are these different envelopes, and it’s the same with ecology. You want to kind of have to think about what your frame of reference is and how wide that is. So there’s these concentric circles. Suppose, ultimately you can end up with the environment of the Earth, the environment that’s enclosed by the atmosphere of the Earth. But I think it’s more useful to think more locally about environments, to draw that envelope more narrowly. And probably this movement towards thinking about bio regionalism, rather than this town, that town or the earth as a big picture, I think is a very productive movement, yeah.

Susannah Sayler
And in fact, I may go further to say that I think that the idea of environmentalism has in some ways estranged us from the world because it’s allowed culturalizations about what an environment is, which tends to be an environment far away, perhaps where polar bears live and so on are in a, you know, Sierra Club calendar and so sort of, I think trying to dig into what we mean by environment and be more specific about it, bio regionalism, or thinking about ecologies and relationships, is very productive.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So okay, we’ll get into Toolshed now, because you mentioned the region instead of the boundaries, and this is a particular project that is located in a specific geography, in a specific place. So if you were to talk about Toolshed, how would you describe it? One, as a project that exists physically, and two, as an idea that has these wonderful four categories, and then we can dive deeper.

Edward Morris
Yeah,so, as we said, the mission of Toolshed is to gather and share tools for living ecologically or logically. And that platform exists in three different ways, and two of which are very local, and one of which is more sort of global or media based. And you know, as Susannah mentioned this, this emphasis on where we live and being local was very important in the origins of tool shed. So the two concrete on the ground local projects are a collection of tools that we lend out, which the Tool Lending Library, and then a collection of books and objects which exist in a public library. And then these two locally situated physical locations and physical locations, those two, those two entities spin off programming like workshops and speaking events and so on.

Susannah Sayler
Yeah, that latter part of the equation is really important to shed, because there’s a lot that happens within the Tool Lending Library or the ecotopian collection, which is the collection of books and objects that we made in collaboration with the artist Mary Mattingly, interactions that happen in those places that we’re not necessarily even involved in there, they become their own sites of social interaction, which is really wonderful. And in addition to that, we have various workshops throughout the year that sometimes are really nuts and bolts, like training people how to be more self-sufficient in using tools or building and other times, they’ll be more focused on art initiatives. For example, we had a wonderful workshop with the artist Ellie Irons, where she taught the participants to make pigments from what she describes as feral plants. So the kinds of plants that grow up through the cracks and City sidewalks or or flowers that she would find in roadside fields. And I would say, right now, our biggest project going on in that nature is a watershed restoration project on the sky Creek with the artist Tim first. Now we’re we’re working to establish willow trees and a creek bed.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And this social interaction part and the workshop part is something that I want to talk about a little bit. So when, when I was at the GSD and we hosted the International Women’s Week, the the theme that we chose to focus on during that week was kinship, and that is something that I, as one of your categories, found very interesting, is that, of course, it’s a place, it’s a two level. It has all these events, but at the crux of it is these social interactions, which, at a community level, have a certain effect. And the way you look at kinship, and the way you look at shelter is through this, through this medium, is, is very interesting. It’s very, very exciting. How do you think of kinship with with reference to the Toolshed?

Edward Morris
Yeah. So as you mentioned, there’s four categories where we’re gathering and sharing these tools: food, Kin, shelter and magic. And to focus on kinship, because essentially, kinship could be a category that all the tools belong to, because that is the most fundamental at the core. Most fundamentally, what we’re trying to do is expand the idea of who and what is kin, and what belongs in your ecology, what belongs in the home that you’re designing for yourself. So at all levels, that’s what we’re trying to do with tooljet. And that happens at a very basic level, the borrowing of tools, just on that basic mechanical level, because if you need something done, and you don’t look for that tool in your house, or buy it for yourself, to own for yourself. But you go somewhere where there’s a shared resource common. You’re already expanding your notion of what your home is. So even on that level, on that sort of transactional level, I feel like there’s something happening in terms of shaping your idea of kin, who belongs in your home, who do you rely on? But then, of course, as you mentioned in these social interactions, when you have you know, it’s always interesting to see who comes to these workshops. So you hold a workshop on Mohican ideas of the willow and how Willow was used in the Mohican tradition, and you just don’t know who’s going to show up. And older people show up, and kids show up, and people you’ve never seen before show up. I think that’s, to me, part of the main point. I mean, Hudson, where we live, is a small city. It’s a city, there’s only 8000 people that live here. How dense it is, and lo and behold, here’s never seen before, and now we’re relating to each other in a room and focused on a plant or whatever it is, learning some skill, and our notions of kin really expand. So that’s how it expands, on the socially, on a social ecological level, but then on a natural ecological level, idea of kin is also expanding because, say, one of the workshops that we did is on how to make pigments from plants that grow around here, plants that sometimes we think of as weeds, right, that actually have some kind of something to offer. You know that that language around plants being invasive species or weeds is a strange discourse. It’s not far from that to make America great again, in a way, you know, it’s like they’re all welcome. All plants are welcome. And all of a sudden you start to see this plant that you thought of as either you didn’t see it because it’s just a plant, or you thought of as a weed, and now you see it’s a chokeberry that has a purple color that you can get the watercolor out of. It really changes your relationship to that plant. It starts expanding this idea of a kinship relation,

Susannah Sayler
Yeah, I think, but it’s really fundamental to the way that dual shed thinks about kin. And how can we within communities, or, you know, within our neighborhoods, create a sense of a commons, even if it’s a simple, simple thing of a Tool Lending Library, and activate that really.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I mean, at this point, it probably sounds a little silly, but I think the tool shed as a project and the Tool Lending Library is also so economical in a certain way. You know, rather than everyone kind of stuffing up their garages with tools that they might need once in a decade, it just seems so much more economical to have a shared resource, like a place where you can get the tools that you want. You borrow it for your tasks, you return them, and it’s the same thing that somebody else can borrow and use it. But it’s also very, very economical.

Edward Morris
Absolutely, and that’s definitely part of the motivation, not just for individuals, but also for organizations. So one of the primary foundational activities that we engaged with when we were thinking about starting Toolshed was having interviews with leaders of different nonprofits in town. And you know, even in the nonprofit space, there is an undercurrent of capitalist competitiveness, where you’re trying to take market share from someone else, you can get those grants and so on. It’s natural, it happens. It’s not blaming anybody, but it’s just that’s an atmosphere that occurs. But here with Toolshed, we’re saying, “Look, let’s think about resources share. We’re all on the same page. We’re all trying to fight the same fight. How can we, we’re not going to start a nonprofit that does what you’re doing. We’re going to start a nonprofit that helps what you’re doing.” And so just on that level, yes, it’s economical for individuals, but it’s also economical for organizations that are trying to make the most out of limited resources.

Susannah Sayler
One concrete example is, like a lot of cities, we’re trying to plant more trees. In Hudson and that has to do not only just with making the city more beautiful. But, of course, to combat rising temperatures, the heat island effect, and so there’s a lot of tree planting going on. And so whenever this happens, the organizations that are working on it need a whole you know, and it’s just this, like, to get it from practical things that, like, where are they going to come from? Because we’re gathering 20 people to work today to plant some trees. And so that’s a concrete example when some of the local organizations reach out to us and are like, can we have some shovels for our tree planting this weekend?

Vaissnavi Shukl
But also the fact that you know, a tool that you’re using, and knowing that it has been used by someone previously, that it’s pre owned, in this case, belongs to an organization, but that it has it’s associated with all these people who, who’ve had hands, you know, have taken care of it so that the person after them can use it in a nice way, kind of taken ownership or responsibility for that tool, kind of made sure that it gets back in the place, ready for the next person. It’s just in that sense. Also, there’s something a little more beautiful about taking responsibility for something to kind of, you know, make sure that the student upkeep is involved and in that process. Also, I somehow feel like something that lived in somebody else’s house is then coming and living in your house before you pass it on, and, you know, it lives in somebody else’s house after that. It’s, it’s this thing that, if you can, you know, like you’re fostering for a bit, and then it just, it goes on to live another life. Either is very, very beautiful.

Edward Morris
You know, I never thought of it quite that way before, that’s really beautiful. That’s, of course, true. And you have some people who will borrow tools. A lot of people borrow tools. And if there’s some slight thing that needs to happen to it, some slight repair, a lot of people do those and bring it back. And it’s so it is really building a kind of like, you say, mutual responsibility, that legacy, that sort of shadow of the previous user, is a really beautiful idea. Yeah.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I mean, it’s like taking a nice, well read book from a library and, you know, somebody has read it before and has probably left a little note or taken good care of it. And if it’s a very well loved book, you know, you might take the responsibility to go get it, you know, rebound and put it back in good shape. So in that sense, happening with tools, which is just so functional. You know, you don’t get emotionally attached to your tools. I mean, you probably do if you’re in the trade. But other than that, it just means to get something done, you know, fix something, to give it that life. I thought it was quite ingenious, but also very practical. That’s really cool.

Edward Morris
Yeah, I missed that aspect of libraries. I don’t know if you remember, but libraries used to have, you know, like a card in it with all the previous borrowers names. They’ve gotten rid of those. They just scan it. You don’t ever see that anymore, but I used to love looking at all the little names that had borrowed it.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, it used to happen in my undergrad, before they went all this little in the new like, physical libraries, they updated the systems, and I would, by the time I was in my thesis, I borrowed a book that apparently I had borrowed in my first year, and this is the fifth year, and there’s only, like one other person who had signed after my name. I could tell the book was not popular, and just to see my own name five years ago, yeah, they don’t do that anymore. You just know it’s on hold or it’s been learned, and you never know when it’s gonna come back.

Edward Morris
So that’s even more beautiful. That’s like interacting with the previous version of yourself. Talk about mental ecology. It’s like you yourself are different.

Vaissnavi Shukl
My handwriting had changed. I could tell my sign had changed. I could tell I was reading the book very differently. But yeah, speaking about books and writing, you have a new book coming up, you’ve been working on it. Tell us more about the book, and I know it’s a culmination of a lot of your previous work, and a lot of things that you’ve been exploring and topics you’ve been working on.

Edward Morris
Yeah. So the book is actually in its early stage. The concept of the book is for Toolshed, and it’s called ‘Recipes for Being Ecological’. It’s called home within homes, recipes for being ecological. And the idea here is that it’ll be formatted exactly like a cookbook, and it’ll be organized in these four chapters: food, kin, shelter and magic. And it’ll be ideas for how it is that you connect with something else, your neighbors, another species, the soil, and that each of the recipes will, in some way, help you be more ecological, or live more ecologically. Everything from recipes for how you start a tool library, because it’s very easy to do. Actually, it can be done on different scales, a tool library to rocking with intention or even meditation. So things that are very easy, things that are more challenging, and we’ll have time budgets for those things as well. And then each of those recipes will end with an account of a user recipe, and those accounts will get guest contributors for those. So it’s a it’s, it’s, it’s designed as a tool. The book itself is designed very practically as a tool. You can pick up this book and get ideas for how you can be orientological. So that’s another way that we’re gathering and sharing.

Susannah Sayler
And the idea of having a lot of contributors is comes out of this sense that we’ve been working on these issues for many years, and we’ve, along the way, you know, developed this incredible kind of group or ecosystem of collaborators and friends and people who have have thought about these issues a lot, and have, you know, personal narratives to contribute about how they’ve found their way through particular methodologies to being more connected equal, and wanting to not only like share the tools, but share the stories as well.

Vaissnavi Shukl
That was supposed to be the last question, but I have one, one more. We spoke about the four categories. We spoke about food, Kin, shelter. I want to talk about magic, and what magic means to you, and what magic could look like.

Edward Morris
Yeah, that’s the wild card. And we always, I always get a smile from whoever I’m talking to, and I enumerate the categories that always end with magic. And people sort of light up when they hear about magic. And I think that’s telling. I think it’s telling because I think there’s a great desire for whatever magic might mean to somebody. There’s a great desire for it out there. And I think that has to do with the fact that the word magic encapsulates, certainly, encampment, but in itself, connection, you know, a lot of these terms are redundant. Kin is redundant to magic. And there’s sort of every, every tool that we isolate could be seen as magic. Everyone can be seen as a tool. But, yeah, magic. Magic means something you can’t understand, that can’t be explained. So magic is a space of unknowing, but it’s always at this core, something that’s transformative, something that changes. And when you start to look at the world ecologically, you realize that those transformations are incredibly constant, incredibly manifold, and incredibly unexplained, and so we’re trying to carve out this space culturally where it’s not an anti-science place at all. I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s not some antithesis to the enlightenment, but it is a compliment to science. It’s understanding that science data, that kind of understanding takes us so far, but ultimately, ecological understanding is an emotional kind of understanding, and that begins when you start to appreciate all the magic out there. So, yes, a magic, spiritual, magic, transformation, Magic’s enchantment, and it’s the tools for feeling that understanding that.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Susannah, I want to know what you think about it as well?

Susannah Sayler
Yeah, I was just thinking about this idea of tuning our friend Tim Morton, who we hope will contribute to the book, who’s a contemporary philosopher and one of the founders of the object oriented ontology movement. So Tim talks about tuning to objects or non human beings and I really like that sense, because it takes it almost to a musical sense of connection, of making a personal connection to like, allowing yourself to open. And, and, to, to the non human and I and it’s very, I think, magical that that idea that one could do that out in the world.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I don’t think we’ve ever, and I don’t know we’ve done 46-47 episodes across five seasons, have ever spoken about magic, and I’m starting to think about why we don’t speak about magic. Is there inherently, do we think, have we started thinking that magic is, as you said, non-scientific? To have started people thinking that it’s kind of like an antidote to the larger discourse, which is very rational, everything that explains that, everything that has a logic, but that’s probably something that we all need to think about, is, you know, what is? What does magic mean for us? Does it have a place in our lives, whatever shape, form, way that it exists? And, I mean, I’m thinking about it, right? Maybe this is what I’ll kind of fall over tonight, but.

Edward Morris
Oh, completely, there’s so much more to say on it. I mean, in some ways, magic is the object of the academy, and so you’re almost ashamed to talk about magic in an academic setting. And yet, everyone has magic, and everyone’s so delighted to engage the topic. So yeah, there is a lot there. We can do a whole other class.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So in, like, the creative fields, even though people don’t talk about, like, shy away from talking about magic, and you talk about creativity every time, once you see something like a piece that is very moving, something that you have a reaction to, if you ever were to, like write a review about whether it’s a filmmaker, whether it’s it’s a musician, an artist, you would say, Oh, the work was magical, you know. So you always use it as an adjective, but you never really use it more actively as a verb. You know? You never think about creating magic. It’s just something that happens. It’s something that’s unexplained. But, wow, this could be an episode about magic.

Edward Morris
Sure. We’ll circle back to that.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well. Edward and Susanna, thank you so much. Was lovely talking to you and all the very best for your book.

Edward Morris
Thank you so much. Thank you.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.

References and additional resources –

More on Toolshed: www.tool-shed.org

Their work: https://www.sayler-morris.com/

Referenced:

Jakob von Uexküll/ ‘Umwelt’- https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/jakob-von-uexkull-umwelt

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us- Ed Yong : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59575939-an-immense-world

The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari –https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/three-ecologies-9781472523815/

Mary Mattingly- https://marymattingly.com/?srsltid=AfmBOooWROLMKrpHfQgRwXFUqIqbooxzYkdFVOnDTZ1t9ApQA0KDNR1H 

Ellie Irons- https://ellieirons.com/ 

Tim Morton- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Morton