August 8, 2025 | Category: Experimental interdisciplinary workshop
Cristobal Bonelli
On 15 April 2025, anthropologist Cristóbal Bonelli (University of Amsterdam) and chemist Martina Gamba (CETMIC, Argentina) were invited contributors to the Energy Storage Research Studio, an experimental program organized by Jorrit Smit (Leiden University), Nicolas Magnard (Leiden Institute of Chemistry), and artist Dorine van Meel, director of the Planetary Poetics temporary Master’s program at the Sandberg Instituut, hosted by Framer Framed (Amsterdam).
Supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the Research Studio brought together scientists, artists, and scholars from the humanities to explore the molecular, political, environmental, and aesthetic dimensions of energy storage—a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of post-fossil transitions.
Bonelli and Gamba’s intervention—drawing from their article “Underground Roots for Ancestral Futures: Exploring Lithium Through an Experimental Alliance between Chemistry and Anthropology” (Science, Technology & Human Values, 2024)—proposed a dialogue between chemistry and anthropology on how to think “experimental alliances” beyond conventional laboratories, imagining situated, relational, and ethically attentive modes of experimentation within the material ecologies of lithium.
During their session, participants collectively developed transdisciplinary experimental protocols aimed at integrating ancestral roots, more-than-human relations, and material flows into research on energy storage and conversion.
Held across Amsterdam and Leiden, the Research Studio was part of a series of gatherings designed to open the black box of energy infrastructures—inviting participants to critically and creatively reflect on which worlds, and whose needs, are being served by so-called green solutions.