GCC Artist Toolkit
GCC has just launched the Artist Toolkit, which brings together practical ideas, actions and resources to support artists in addressing the climate crisis. This toolkit offers guidance for each step of artistic practice, as well as ways you can harness your influence to promote environmental responsibility beyond your own practice.
Whether through direct action, thematic exploration, or leveraging their influence, artists have diverse avenues to take action. However, knowing where to start is often the hardest part. From effective actions to a comprehensive resource index, as well as a blueprint for creating your own environmental responsibility rider, the GCC Artist Toolkit will equip you with the means to effect tangible change.
Project Calculator
The newly redesigned GCC Carbon Calculator is LIVE! Click here to start calculating your own emissions
After a year of collaboration with members, developers, and environmental experts, GCC’s enhanced tool is ready to make carbon reporting simpler and more insightful for all its users. Since 2020, the Carbon Calculator has empowered organisations to track emissions and take climate action. Now, they’ve made it even better! The new carbon calculator was partially made possible through a research and development process as part of the sustainable institution.
Jan Boelen
We need systemic change. We should change which kind of materials we source, how we manufacture, what we use them for, everything. Norms and standards are really blocking innovation, the plastic soup won’t go away by recycling plastic. We need materials that are nearer to nature, that are in dialogue with nature. That’s where the solution is.
Jan Boelen, Artistic Director, LUMA Atelier
Pablo Wendel
When you talk about energy, you always think about how much you produce or use, but no one questions how much you need to change something, or to build up a new infrastructure, even if it’s a sustainable one.
Pablo Wendel Co-Artistic Director, E-WERK Luckenwalde.
forum
the forum is an online discussion platform for those motivated to enact cultural systemic-change on an environmental, economic and human level.
tsi prototypes
the sustainable institution is motivated by the recognition that ‘raising awareness’ is no longer enough; that a profound rethink in business modelling and that new material (or immaterial) prototypes are urgently needed for the cultural sector.
In line with this, the 2024 prototypes developed by Beth Collar, bones tan jones and Kirsty Robertson will be made publicly available on the digital toolkit by Autumn 2024.
Each prototype will be trademarked as a tsi prototype, but left unpatented so that other cultural institutions and practitioners are able to freely benefit. Cultural institutions and practitioners will be able to apply for use of these prototypes in their own institutional development towards sustainable exhibition making.
Stay tuned for more prototype information!
gcc resources
Additionally, the sustainable institution has partnered up with Gallery Climate Coalition to highlight what they believe to be the five key areas of sustainable development on an institutional level; travel, materials, energy, digital, print and packaging. In an endeavour towards establishing a sharing culture, and not duplicating pre-existing work, the sustainable institution is sharing GCC’s. Please find links to GCC’s resources below to help in your transformation towards institutional sustainability.
carbon calculation to date:
21.96 (tCO2e)
In collaboration with Gallery Climate Coalition the sustainable institution is calculating the carbon footprint of the entire project, which includes the carbon footprint of all travel, digital work, print, packaging and energy. In addition tsi will share prototypes, symposium excerpts, performances, actionable guidelines, a collection of established resources and public forum for discussion.
To calculate the carbon of the project, rather than the individual institution’s footprint, is an endeavour to think eco systemically about carbon. To go one step further than thinking of the institution as an ecosystem, but to think of the international cultural landscape as an interconnected ecosystem, interdependent on one another. To question: how might it be possible to share our ethical responsibilities towards carbon emissions in relation to our geopolitical, financial and human resources? How could we begin to think about the carbon emissions of a project, rather than a singular institution – and move towards a more symbiotic or eco-systemic approach between institutions? How can we support each other to share the budget and compensate for each other on an inter-institutional level?
To view tsi’s carbon calculation in full click here.
toolkit
the sustainable institution digital toolkit is an open resource for those working and participating in culture to support systemic-change, in collaboration with Gallery Climate Coalition.
The toolkit is a tool for culture to improve ecological, economic and human sustainability. In collaboration with Gallery Climate Coalition, the toolkit presents the project’s carbon calculation in addition to prototypes, symposium excerpts, performances, actionable guidelines, a collection of established resources and public forum for discussion. This is available online to the public, who can use the tools for their own transformation towards sustainability.
