The energy lab
The Energy Lab is intended to be an interdisciplinary gathering of artists, writers, historians, lawyers, activists, and researchers around questions of energy. These questions include but are not exclusive to energy's entanglements with Pakistan's development sector, climate and ecological concerns, social geographies, and fiscal policies. We take pause to reflect on imaginations of energy, its significance, insignificance, forms, limitations, challenges, and explore alternative futures.
The questions are interrogated in the form of workshops geared towards the interrogation of shared artifacts, infrastructures, policies, laws, poetics, communal understandings/confrontations, and financial circuits. Each session follows a layout of activities hoping to provoke conversations which are then continued in successive gatherings with the aim of following lines of flight to their extended implications. Focal questions of the gatherings are hence kept flexible with the hope of being changed by the ponderings that participants will bring to the table.
These lines of flight are then charted, collectively collated, and archived and will be brought together in the form of a public facing exhibition. The workshops themselves are also individually designed to render tactile and deliberative miniature projects speaking to live questions (concerns around policy reform, communal implications, and method); interrogation of artifacts is done with the aim of developing alternative artifacts for example.
What is the need for the energy lab?
The Energy Lab emerges from the recognition that conventional ways of learning, planning, using, and governing energy are increasingly inadequate—particularly in moments of rapid change or systemic stress. Energy systems are typically approached through narrow technical, economic, or policy lenses that presume stability, linear growth, and shared understandings of need and progress. Recent developments in Pakistan’s energy landscape—persistent overcapacity, the continued push for large hydropower, and the rapid solar boom—have exposed how quickly these assumptions can fracture.
By bringing artists, researchers, lawyers, historians, and activists into sustained conversation around shared , the Lab creates a space in which incommensurable languages of energy can encounter one another without being prematurely resolved. Disagreement is not treated as a failure but as a diagnostic of uneven knowledge and power relations—revealing whose language becomes legible in policy and whose is dismissed as anecdotal, emotional, or unscientific. Attentive to our particular contexts, the Lab accepts that misunderstanding, equivocation, and partial translation are inevitable when different worlds meet.
The Lab tests whether meaningful dialogue can unfold across such difference without collapsing into domination or forced consensus. It asks whether disparate experiences, disciplines, practices, and vocabularies of energy can be mapped into a shared resource for reimagining energy in practice. By tracing and testing the lines of flight that emerge from these exchanges, the Lab seeks to generate perspectives capable of speaking more honestly to long-standing challenges in policy planning, legal reform, local governance, finance, and market practices—particularly as they intersect with regional identity and extractive economies..
Ultimately, the Energy Lab refuses to treat energy as a purely technical problem. Instead, it approaches energy as a social, political, cultural, and imaginative field—one that demands slower, more attentive forms of collective thinking. In doing so, the Lab does not aim to replace existing expertise, but to unsettle it, creating space for alternative futures grounded as much in lived experience as in models, laws, and abstract plans.
Logistics
The Energy Lab will run as a series of workshops over an 18-month period, starting January 2026. Participants will convene regularly—approximately once every three weeks—for in-person sessions in Lahore, with the possibility of engaging in and around other geographies depending on collective interest.
Limited financial support is available for participants.