Cancelled artwork in Belém generates 57,765 Cultural Degrowth Credits
“An artwork to help the world breath better.”
Josep Piñol is Spanish artist whose work includes performance, installation, video art, and photography. His most recent project was a large-scale sculpture designed also to operate as a direct air capture plant. It was to be constructed in Belém to coincide with COP30.
The sculpture consisted of 100 bronze figures in business suits standing on coffins. The figures represented the anonymous decision-makers behind the greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis.
On 4 October 2025, at a performance at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, Piñol publicly committed not to build the sculpture by signing a notarised document cancelling the artwork.
By not going ahead Piñol calculates that he has avoided the emissions of 57,765 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. These avoided emissions have been certified as carbon credits worth a total of US$1.6 million.
Piñol told the Spanish TV company RTVE,
“In times of climate emergency, not everything deserves to be built: there are works that speak more in their absence than in cement and bronze.”
“An artwork to help the world breath better”
Piñol initially intended to create the installation. He developed 3D models and raised US$21.57 million. A promotional video describes the installation as, “An artwork to help the world breath better.”
“The idea started at a cocktail party,” Piñol told Surface. “I witnessed a toast among C-suite executives celebrating ‘avoided emissions’ as a market value. That meaningless, greenwashing emptiness both outraged and fascinated me.”
He started researching, talking to lawyers, carbon consultants, and engineers. “I spent months asking everyone everywhere what on earth ‘avoided emissions’ really meant,” Piñol told Surface. “Very few knew.”
Piñol developed the Climate Certification Standard for Non-Production in the Artistic and Cultural Sector. The Art Carbon Avoidance website describes the standard as a,
Specialised technical body for certifying avoided climate impact derived from the non-execution of artistic and cultural projects, which regulates the Cultural Degrowth Credits (CDC).
Piñol describes carbon trading as a modern-day “papal indulgence”. He says “It’s like buying permission to pollute.”
He told RTVE that,
“A company can generate a fake threat, say, to deforest 5% of the Amazon, and then earn credits simply by not doing it. It’s a market of hypothetical pollution.”
Piñol sold one carbon credit to a private collector. He cancelled the rest, so that “they cannot become the object of speculation or be used in corporate sustainability reports,” he told RTVE.
Very clever, this is what art should be. Yet has he not paved the way for other artists to actually trade 'cultural degrowth credits' by developing the certification? Or will the certification be cancelled too?