Anti-Offsetting Primer

Luiza Prado and Elena Agudio discuss Agudio’s role and work as part of SAVVY Contemporary, a research-led counterinstitution and collective in Berlin. Elena Agudio is an art historian and curator. Her practice has led her on a journey to unlearn her formal Art History training and explore how anticolonial and feminist practices can manifest and be practised in non-traditional art spaces. Over the past decade she has curated numerous exhibitions, archives, collaborations and programmes at the horizontally-structured art organisation in Berlin; what her and her comrades describe as “an institution-in-perpetual-becoming”.

As part of the research conducted for the Anti-Offsetting Primer, Prado and Agudio discuss the history and working practices of SAVVY Contemporary, asymmetric power imbalances in the art world, and how an ecological sensibility can take the form of relational carework that happens within and as part of a communal art practice.

The Anti-Offsetting Primer is an anticolonial inquiry into carbon offsetting in the arts. Carbon offsetting is a flawed policy tool that allows polluters to compensate for carbon dioxide emissions arising from industrial and other human activity. Through artistic-research and cooperative learning, Prado engages with various anticolonial practices to present other possible ways of doing art beyond extractivism.