January 22, 2025

Today, Virág from the climate-neutral working group and Elie, the climate officer, met to go through Elie’s questions regarding the carbon calculations and the CO₂ logbook. Using the draft version of the logbook as a basis, Elie corrected some of the assumptions we had made about the calculation process. The climate balance will include not only emissions tied to invoices but also those we can reconstruct from documentation and memory. For example, in the lead-up to the exhibition installation, Elie was slightly ill and chose to use his private car to pick up exhibition materials, not wanting to risk exhausting himself with a bike ride. Even though these expenses were not reimbursed, he will include the related emissions, as part of his responsibility to document how purchased materials arrived at nGbK. This kind of carbon accounting involves a significant amount of forensic reconstruction—piecing things together through documentation, memory, or reasonable estimation. While a numerical result will emerge in the end, it will inevitably remain something of a fiction.

Looking at Elie’s complex Excel sheet, it seemed relatively straightforward to determine how much CO₂ was associated with each activity within the project. Once the carbon accounting is complete, we plan to include the related emissions alongside each entry in the logbook. We hope this will become a helpful point of reference for others interested in carbon-neutral art production.