Bonelli and Weinberg Discussed Uncommon Territories and Energy Transitions in Asunción, Paraguay

Cristóbal Bonelli and Marina Weinberg, both researchers from the Worlds of Lithium (WOL) project, participated in the seminar "Territorialidades Divergentes en América del Sur", organized by Mario Blaser and Cristina Rojas in Asunción, Paraguay, from April 9 to April 11, 2025. This gathering brought together scholars working across Latin America to explore how different ways of inhabiting and shaping territories challenge dominant frameworks of modernization and development.

Bonelli presented his work "Gardens at the Edge of the Falling Sky", where he reflects on how energy transitions reshape landscapes and ways of living. Focusing on lithium mining in northern Chile, his talk explored how extraction projects not only transform ecosystems but also affect the ways in which local communities perceive and engage with their surroundings. Inspired by the ideas of Davi Kopenawa and Bernard Stiegler, Bonelli invites us to think beyond simple narratives of sustainability and consider what remains, resists, and reconfigures in these shifting terrains.

Weinberg, in turn, presented "Between the Pluriverse and the Multiverse: Lithium Off-sites, Capitalist Science Fiction, and World-Making". Her talk explored how lithium infrastructures generate unexpected spatial and temporal displacements — what she calls “off-sites”— that challenge the dominant techno-scientific imagination of the energy transition. Drawing on speculative thought and grounded fieldwork, Weinberg examined how alternative world-making practices emerge in the cracks of extractive capitalism.

The seminar also featured contributions from scholars including Pilar Riaño, Daniel Ruiz Serna, Salvador Schavelzon, Lorna Quiroga, José Candido Ferreira, Valentina Bonifacio, Cristina Rojas, and Toribia Lero Quispe, along with local participants and community organizations. Through open discussions and collaborative reflections, the event aimed to generate new insights into the diverse ways territories are shaped, contested, and lived.