Nieuwe Instituut – The Tool Shed (2022 – ongoing)

Over the past four years and together with colleagues and external collaborators, the research team at the Nieuwe Instituut has implemented various versions of the Tool Shed. Tool Sheds are fictional, shared spaces of expertise, strategies and tactics (tools and methods) brought into life by a stakeholder group (say: a collective of …) as a space of change-making or re-worlding. Tool Shed and Tool Shedding has gradually crystalised into a world-building methodology. Tool Sheds offer actionable, often already existing, alternatives or futures to harmful present (worlds and systems).

The concept of the Tool Shed emerged from the Nieuwe Instituut’s Collecting Otherwise project, that dealt with archives and their institutions. The Collecting Otherwise Tool Shed hinged on three main principles: neighbourly borrowing, maintaining and shedding, which were found to resonate across ‘sheds’ with similar values. See also the commissioned article to Alfred Marasigan named, ‘On Shedding’: https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/articles/on-shedding. Research practices are ‘borrowed’ and developed as problem-solving tools, carefully ‘maintained’ for future use, and finally ‘shed’, or passed on to others who could benefit from them. These tools might be protocols, hardware, manuals, recipes or scores.

In 2026, HumDrumPress and the Nieuwe Instituut presented a series of Research Nights exploring a collaborative publication: Tool Shed. The evenings featured a presentation, discussion and workshop, inviting early collaborators, cultural workers and practitioners to experiment with the ideas behind Tool Shed, collaboration and worlding in the cultural sector.

In 2027, more publications are to come.