Artist Josep Piñol’s “Cultural Degrowth Credits,” Born from a Scrapped $22 Million Sculpture

On October 4, Josep Piñol announced the cancellation of his $22 million sculpture—set to double as a direct air capture system—aligned with the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. In its place, the Spanish artist has released an art world iteration of carbon credits, the controversial system that often allows polluters the opportunity to pay to offset the damage they continue to cause. With this gestural work, entitled AVOIDED, Piñol’s mission—overseen by a legal entity and an independent evaluation body—is to shine a light on the system and generate real change. Further, by not erecting the original sculpture, he’s prevented the emission of 57,765 tonnes of CO2.

“The idea started at a cocktail party where I witnessed a toast among C-suite executives celebrating ‘avoided emissions’ as a market value,” Piñol tells Surface. “That meaningless, greenwashing emptiness both outraged and fascinated me.” The artist began “researching, talking with lawyers, environmental consultants specializing in carbon footprint, and engineers; and I spent months asking everyone everywhere what on earth ‘avoided emissions’ really meant. Very few knew.”

Piñol began to develop a sculptural work called attention to the marketing machinery around carbon credits—set to be unveiled in Belém, in advance of COP30. “I decided to cancel the work at an advanced stage of the project,” he says. “I realized that my so-called ‘climate solution’ was disproportionate, and like so many green promises sold in the name of sustainability, it ultimately generated an environmental impact greater than what we would be able to give back to the planet over the next 20 years. Did the world really need this work? For what reason?”

The artist ascertained that his message about “avoided emissions” would reach the public “just the same, and perhaps even more forcefully, by avoiding the work itself. So we calculated the carbon footprint of the proposed work with a team of engineers and environmental consultants, developed the standard, underwent independent external auditing, and issued the corresponding Cultural Degrowth Credits. Since then, it has taken more than nine months, the birth of uninterrupted work, with a very large and multidisciplinary team, to make it real and legal.”