On nuclear pasts
and radiant futures
Logo: SALT.CLAY.ROCK.
Artistic research
and exhibition

co2 logbook

Challenge

SALT. CLAY. ROCK. received part of its funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation's Zero Fund program. By accepting the grant, we have agreed to participate in the foundation’s exploration of how to produce climate neutral cultural productions, as well as practices of environmental sustainability and climate-friendly alternatives to cultural production.

In accepting this grant, nGbK as an institution and our project must research and orient towards a climate neutral production. We’ve worked with the help of Elie Peuvrel, nGbK’s newly appointed climate officer. Each year a CO2 balance is calculated for our project, and is then accounted for by Arqum, an independent accounting firm, supplied by the German Cultural Foundation. In total we are allowed to offset 1% of the total funding amount. In our case, 1% of the total budget would allow us to buy certificates to compensate for between 40 and 100 tons of CO2 (or its equivalent in other greenhouse gasses).

“With the application-based “Zero Fund”, the Federal Cultural Foundation helps cultural institutions develop climate neutral production forms, explore new aesthetics with as minimal an impact on the climate as possible. By promoting the development and implementation of artistically innovative and climate neutral art and cultural projects in 2023-2024, the Foundation hopes to sensitize cultural institutions and artists to the possibilities of environmentally sustainable production methods, and so doing, advance measures which actively protect our climate. The aim is to develop a model that encourages the German cultural sector to reduce greenhouse gasses in the long term.”’’ (from the Zero Fund webpage)

As part of the funding requirement, we, the SALT. CLAY. ROCK. working group also committed to prepare a guideline for climate neutral production, on the basis of our experiences, at the end of the project. Here we collect our thoughts and reflections along the way. We felt that writing a straightforward guideline would be neither reflective of our actual approach, nor useful for readers. To understand how to do carbon accounting involves wrapping your head around a series of concepts and strategies that did not appear so straightforward as a guideline. 

Thus, below are several discussions around climate neutrality, and thoughts and questions inspired by the climate neutral process. 

Following that is a logbook of our efforts to produce our two-year transnational curatorial and artistic research project with site-based productions in rural areas in Hungary and Germany, and a final exhibition in Berlin.

Discussion

Conducting a multi-year transnational curatorial and artistic research project with an aim to maintain climate neutrality, we encountered a variety of practical and conceptual challenges that we discuss below. 

We anticipated that mobility and the transnational nature of the project would be a challenge, and thus dreamt of a slower pace of production and research. We are excited to see any aesthetic responses by the artists to the CO2 challenge; in terms of formats, media and materials, and how climate neutrality might conceptually connect to our focus on (nuclear) energy futures.

We suspected that there would be many purely administrative aspects of the project, yet were nevertheless unprepared for the practical concerns and conceptual twists that arose in the production and accounting process. 

Below are more in-depth discussions of the challenges we faced in conducting our complicated project in a climate neutral way, and of the conceptual issues we have with accounting methods.

Logbook

Below is a logbook of events, travels, decisions, and discussions we had around climate-neutrality over the two years of our project. The entries are in chronological order, reflecting how the field of carbon accounting unfolded for us—step by step, through a process of learning by doing. We included all the travel associated with the project, as we quickly learned that personal mobility, which has an outsized carbon footprint in comparison to object transport, posed one of the greatest climate-neutrality challenges. Frequent travel to remote rural locations and between Germany and Hungary is conceptually inscribed to our project, and therefore particularly significant to our documentation.After our carbon accounting is finished, we will be able to add the carbon emissions calculated to each program aspect and decisions included in this logbook. We hope this will help future climate-neutral projects to orient their work to our concrete numbers.