The art of accumulating unread books takes on another dimension when the wait stretches a full century. From that idea arose Future Library, an artistic and literary project in Norway that aims to gather a total of one hundred manuscripts that will remain stored until 2114.
Driven by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, the initiative began in 2014 with a premise as simple as it is unusual: each year, a writer delivers an unpublished work that will be safeguarded for a hundred years in the Silence Room of the Deichman Bjørvika Library (Oslo).
When that moment arrives, the manuscripts will be printed on paper fashioned from the trees planted specifically for the project in Nordmarka, north of Oslo. In that forest, for twelve years a thousand Norwegian spruces, birches and wild pines have grown, destined to become the paper of an anthology that is still under construction.
Paterson draws a link between the trees’ growth and literary creation: the words remain invisible while the material that will print them continues to develop. As if each ring of the trunk were a chapter yet to be completed.
