Atlas of Green Energy Transitions / Lithium Laterals
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Atlas of Green Energy Transitions / Lithium Laterals
Exhibition
Fri, Mar 20–Fri, Apr 17
Campbell Corner Gallery
Lithium Laterals
Workshop
Mon, Mar 23, 6 PM
Campbell Hall Corner Gallery*
*This workshop is part of the Leftovers Graduate Open House Showcase
Atlas of Green Energy Transitions
Book Talk
Thurs, Apr 9, 5 PM
Van Lengen Lobby
Copies of this publication will be available for purchase at a discounted rate
This exhibition highlights the new title Atlas of Green Energy Transitions: Power, Conflict, and Possibilities (Routledge, 2025), edited by Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Matthew Seibert. The edited collection of scholars and activists employs immersive first-person narrative descriptions and rich imagery to tell the oft-revealing stories of contestation, exploitation, and complication within the landscapes upon which the world’s green energy transition depends: the unsanctioned cobalt mines of the Congo, the solar farms clearing vast tracts of the Mojave Desert, the scattered e-waste operations of Zimbabwe, among others.
The book not only engages the green energy transition, a topic of accelerating importance and topical prevalence, but uniquely exhibits the skills of landscape architectural practice to communicate environmental challenges of global proportions, identify points of interdisciplinary intervention, and craft compelling futures to catalyze change.
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As a complement to this research, the exhibition includes the interactive project Lithium Laterals: A Mineral Tarot for Invoking New Worlds. Created by Matthew Seibert and Julia MacNelly (MLA '25), Lithium Laterals is part cartomancy, part spatial association, part lateral thinking—it is a tool for constructing counternarratives to challenge dominant trajectories of the energy transition. The deck's structure and interdisciplinary approach encourage diverse interpretations, aiming to stimulate alternative worldviews and pathways to more equitable futures.
The exhibition is activated by two programs: a workshop held in the Corner Gallery on Monday March 23, as part of our Graduate Open House showcase and a book talk held in the Van Lengen Lobby on Thursday April 9 at 5pm.
About Matthew Seibert
Matthew Seibert’s work aspires to encourage one to rethink their position and relation to the world as the first, fundamental step in a theory of change toward a just, more promising future.
As an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia, his research and teaching challenge dominant modes of knowledge production with specific attention to land relations. This practice and pedagogy in support of a world where many worlds and worldviews are not only welcome, but desired, is built first by creatively interrogating conventional ways of knowing through strategic disorientation. In the design of novel tools and methods, presuppositions can be disassembled, cultural constructions confronted, and power structures dismantled, enabling a radical rebuilding of self, community, and environment in new and powerful ways. One must look backward and inward to orient the march forward.
This exhibition is part of Leftovers: Rethinking Waste in Design, an exhibition and public programs series to rethink how we make, reuse, and imagine materials and environments in a time of climate urgency, generously supported by UVA Arts Council.
