Commencing in 2014 and continuing through to 2114, Future Library is a public artwork and powerful gesture of hope for a world beyond our lifetime. Each year of the project, an author is invited to produce a newly commissioned piece of writing, which will form an anthology of one hundred texts, unread and unpublished until 2114.
Concurrent with the writing of these texts, a forest of Norwegian spruce is growing in Nordmarka, on the outskirts of Oslo, to be processed into the paper that will be used to print the anthology in 2114.
The Library features ephemera related to Future Library, including a round of spruce cut from the Nordmarka forest and pamphlets produced in conjunction with the handover ceremony of each author’s manuscript.
The presentation also includes a Future Library Certificate, which secures ownership of one copy of the published anthology in 2114, and a video about the artwork, commissioned for Paterson’s solo exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
Find out more about Katie Paterson’s Future Library on it’s dedicated website.
Margaret Atwood – Oryx and Crake
Bloomsbury, 2003
David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
Sceptre, 2004
Sjón – The Blue Fox
Bjartur, 2003
Elif Shafak – The Island of Missing Trees
Viking (Penguin Press), 2021
Han Kang – The White Book
Portobello Books, 2016
Karl Ove Knausgård – The Morning Star
Oktober Forlag, 2020
Ocean Vuong –Time Is a Mother
Penguin Press, 2022
Judith Schalansky – An Inventory of Losses
MacLehose Press, 2018
Valeria Luiselli – Lost Children Archive
Alfred A. Knopf, 2019
Tommy Orange – There There
Alfred A. Knopf, 2018
Amitav Ghosh – The Great Derangement
Penguin Books, 2016
Also available in the Library are a selection of the artists publications:
Katie Paterson – Requiem
Ingleby Gallery / National Glass Centre, 2022
Katie Paterson – A Place That Exists Only In Moonlight
Kerber Verlag, 2019
Image credit: Eoin Carey
Image credit: Eoin Carey
Image credit: Eoin Carey
Image credit: Eoin Carey
