MacGuffin and Tools: the world in objects

Tools, from the cover to the lab

With Tools, everything starts from a screen. What catches the eye is the object depicted on the cover of the debut issue, entitled To Mold: a roller skate. An image unusual enough to interrupt your desultory scrolling and make you want to know more.

Founded in Paris in 2021 on the initiative of Clémentine Berry, founder of the art direction studio Twice, Tools explores the processes that shape things. Annual and bilingual, in French and English, it devotes each issue to a technique, interweaving historical insights, factory reports and artisanal knowledge.

If MacGuffin follows objects in their multiple existences, Tools seems to want to surprise them as they come into the world. Its focus is on gestures, tools and processes. That intelligence of the hands that Richard Sennett wrote of in The Craftsman, and which frequently tends to become invisible in the finished object.

The illustrations make up a large part of the magazine. Surfaces, materials and details of processing are photographed with a care that makes even the least familiar procedures fascinating. It makes you want to understand how a certain form is achieved, what happens to the material during processing, and how much experience is concealed behind an apparently simple gesture.

The sixth issue, To Blow, published in September, is devoted to blowing and inflating. The protagonist is air, an invisible yet decisive element in many creative processes. Devoting a whole magazine to something we can’t see is a rather bold choice. But also perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the publication.

This way of looking at creation that recalls the thought of the anthropologist Tim Ingold. Forms are not simply imposed on matter, but emerge from the encounter between materials, gestures and forces in movement. Even air, apparently impalpable, shares in this process.

After leafing through Tools, even a seemingly simple object can raise a few more questions. Not only how it is made, but what has happened to make it take that shape.

Read also: Tools Magazine and the art of folding 

After browsing

The beauty of certain magazines is that they do not end with the last page. Rather, they change the way we look at what we have around us. A window, a mirror or any other object can become opportunities to question the habits, meanings and processes that have determined its form and use. Even the most ordinary things reveal a complexity that we would hardly have considered.

It is a curiosity that tends to expand and that, inevitably, prompts us to look forward to the next issue. The magazines stack up, space on our bookshelves dwindles, and the problem of where to put them is regularly put off until the next copy we purchase.