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.
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 taught us to love books, magic and old trees. 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.
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