The Bricoleurs and Bricoleuses course in 2021 was conducted in the middle of the pandemic. While students were confined to their screens, the self and the neighborhood became their fields. The course urges students to don the  figure of the Bricoleur/Bricoleuse to create biographies of the self with an expanded perimeter, including within in, the other and various practices and institutions that build the relationship between the self and the other.


The course helps students to build a long-duree aesthetic practice, where chance encounters between life, its multiple relationships, aesthetic experiences, philosophical questions and our references get entangled through the trope of the bricoleur/ bricoleuse.


The students explorations are compiled here: https://read.bookcreator.com/C5egMPfQFmMZJ0G5689EwTXxuNy2/gVcHVkzOQs2cja2vYPjWrQ

For Prishita, the city opens through a chance encounter along Powai lake with a migrant carpenter, who comes to the Powai lake for fishing in his spare time, reminiscing of the landscapes in Bihar where he grew up.

Maitri's grandfather migrated to Mumbai in the 60s to work in the booming diamond industry. She looks back at his life through his collections, deciphering how the city shaped the person and the person shaped the city.

Ria looks closely at how various enterprises in Mahavir Nagar tactically claim space and engage in multiple negotiations.

Harshita looks closely at the inhabitation of a nail house, engulfed by large scale development and highrise buildings.

Khusboo looks closely at her grandmother's collection and her practice of stitching and through this her journey from Pakistan, post partition.

Dhanvi looks at the phenomenological dimensions of addresses and the thicknesses of stories that they hold.

Shubh looks at the operations and practices of the gaming community and how they make inhabitations.

Jahnavi looks at her grandmother's recipe book and the Proustian memories of places it is soaked with.

Preet opens up questions around the notion of art, human emotions, feelings and their interpretations, as artworks are developed through generative algorithms, and the AI becomes the artist itself, blurring the distinction between the human and the digital realms.

Sharvri collects stories of gardeners who create whole new worlds and imaginations through their practice

Nikeita engages with her grandfather's diaries as a bricoleur, where the diaries become a map of his constellation of thoughts, memories, fears, repeated attempts, incomplete entries, absurd categories, all triggered by the fear of losing memory.

Charmi tells the story of inhabitation as the practice of claiming a standard house to make it a workshop by a woman entrepreneur.

Mohini looks at markets as a form of a daily performance, a theatre in the city.

Devanshi traces how the city becomes home for its inhabitants.

Sneha mines through her father's diaries written between 1970s - 90s, to tell us the story of a migrant making home in the city.
Gauri looks at how the market space is produced through everyday relationships, objects and transactional spaces.