co2 logbook

As a condition of the grant, both nGbK as an institution and our project are required to research and work toward climate-neutral production. We have done so with the support of Elie Peuvrel, nGbK’s newly appointed climate officer. Each year, a CO₂ balance is calculated for our project and reviewed by Arqum, an independent auditing firm commissioned by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. We are permitted to offset up to 1 percent of the total funding amount. In our case, this allows us to purchase certificates to compensate for between 40 and 100 tons of CO₂ (or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases).

“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 requirements, we—the SALT. CLAY. ROCK. working group—also committed to preparing a guideline for climate-neutral production, based on our experiences, at the end of the project. The following is a collection of our thoughts and reflections gathered along the way. We felt that writing a straightforward guideline would neither reflect our actual approach nor be particularly useful for readers. Understanding how to carry out carbon accounting involves engaging with a set of concepts and strategies that did not seem to us to be as straightforward as guideline. Thus, what follows are a series of discussions on climate neutrality, along with thoughts and questions inspired by the climate-neutral production process. To this, we have then added a logbook documenting our efforts to realize a two-year, transnational curatorial and artistic research project, which included site-based productions in rural areas of Hungary and Germany and a final exhibition in Berlin.

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 were eager to see how the participating artists might respond aesthetically to the CO₂ challenge—in terms of formats, media, and materials—and how climate neutrality might conceptually intersect with our focus on (nuclear) energy futures.

We suspected that there would be many purely administrative aspects to this part of the project, yet were nevertheless unprepared for the practical concerns and conceptual twists that arose during both the production and the accounting processes.

We provide below a more in-depth discussion of the challenges we faced in attempting to realize such a complex project in a climate-neutral way, and of the conceptual concerns we encountered with accounting methodologies.

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 toour project, and therefore particularly significant to our documentation. After our carbon accounting was finished, we were be able to add the carbon emissions calculated to most program aspects and decisions included in this logbook. We hope this will help future climate-neutral projects use our concrete figures as a helpful point of reference.