The next manuscript by the American artist Laurie Anderson will remain unseen for 88 years, as she becomes the 13th figure to contribute to the Future Library project.
Anderson joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong and other prominent authors who have written secret manuscripts, which have been locked away until 2114.
The texts are stored in a specially designed silent room in the Deichman Bjørvika building at the public library in Oslo. At the end of the project, the full anthology of texts will be printed using paper made from trees from the Future Library forest in Nordmarka, in northern Oslo, where 1,000 spruce trees were planted by Katie Paterson, the artist behind the project, in 2014.
Anderson is a writer, director, composer, visual artist, musician and vocalist whose work spans art, theatre, experimental music and technology.
She has created numerous multimedia stage performances and published 10 books, as well as being nominated for six Grammy Awards, winning once and receiving a lifetime achievement award in 2024. Her visual art has been exhibited globally at institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Anderson’s manuscript for the project may be a text, a score, a story, a set of instructions or “something for which we do not yet have a name”, Paterson said.
Anderson said: “I absolutely loved the idea of the Future Library as soon as I learned about it. I’ve always been in love with books, libraries and forests. When I was a kid we lived next to a large park filled with maple, elm and oak trees. At the far corner of the park was an enormous red oak tree and up the street and just around the bend, there was the library, a rustic fieldstone building filled with comfortable pillows and many thousands of books.
“‘You better check with grandfather tree today if you have the time,’ my mother would say some mornings. In a house where candy of all kinds was forbidden, we knew what that meant: there would be chocolate bars and chocolate mints up in the fork of the red oak, just low enough for us to hoist ourselves up and grab them. It also meant that we’d have extra incentive that day to get to the library.”
Anderson called her mother a “brilliant and unhappy woman”. She said she should have been a chief executive of a large corporation but instead had eight children. “She loved books and somehow made it a project to get up early in the morning, walk through the park and hide chocolate bars in a tree. She taught us to love books, magic and old trees.
“I’m hoping to be able to write something useful about love for the people who will read this in 2114. My favourite books are the ones in which I can hear someone’s voice, which is why I’ll try my best to make myself clear to the people who come across these books in the next century.”
The Future Library Trust said it had selected Anderson for her “singular ability to speak across time, creating work that is profoundly human, radically imaginative and alive to futures we cannot yet foresee”.
Paterson added: “Laurie Anderson has spent a lifetime sending signals into the unknown. For decades, she has explored how we tell stories, how we remember, and how we imagine what is yet to come. Moving freely between language, music, visual art, technology and performance, her work travels between the intimate and the planetary, love and loss, politics and poetry, with humour, tenderness and wonder.”
Other writers to have contributed to the project include David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Judith Schalansky, Valeria Luiselli, Tommy Orange and, most recently, Amitav Ghosh.
In June 2022, the City of Oslo signed an agreement that ensures the forest will remain in the hands of the Future Library Trust for the duration of the project.
