This year, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga and the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard came to hand over their stories....
BITS ‘N’ PIECES
Every year since 2014, the Scottish artist Katie Paterson has invited a prominent writer to submit a manuscript, and the commissioning will continue until 2113. Then, a century after the project Future Library began, they will all finally be published.
It began with the author Margaret Atwood, who wrote a story called Scribbler Moon and since then the library has solicited submissions from all over the world, with works by English novelist David Mitchell, the Icelandic poet Sjón, Turkey’s Elif Shafak, Han Kang from South Korea, and Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong. This year, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga and the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard came to hand over their stories.
All the manuscripts will be stored inside locked glass drawers in a hidden corner of Oslo’s main public library, within a small, wooden repository called the Silent Room.
The Silent Room is like a wooden cave, in a quiet corner among the bookshelves. Inside, ridges along the walls encircle the small space with 100 locked glass drawers, one for each of the manuscripts. “It feels like being inside a tree,” says Paterson. “It’s quite magical, because it’s very small and intimate: surrounded by tree rings, with light shining through the manuscript drawers.”
One thing to be admired about Future Library is its capacity to evolve and adapt over time. Paterson and colleagues designed it to give subsequent generations choice about how to shape the project: which authors to select, how to conduct the ceremony each year, who to invite, and eventually what will go on the books’ covers.
Flowers destined for long voyages need extra attention to prepare them as soon as they are picked.
They are harvested early in the morning, when it’s still cool, and they are the first to go into the cold room. Freshly-harvested roses, for instance, are then dipped into a chemical mixture to protect them from the fungus, botrytis.
After that, the stems are put into buckets to absorb a hydration solution so they can survive the thirty days without water. They are also put in a solution that curbs the growth hormone, ethylene, which causes the ageing of the flowers.
Once that process is completed, the flowers are then packed into cartons with holes in the top and bottom, which allow air from the container’s system to circulate.
“The flowers will be kept at a temperature of 0.5 degrees celsius throughout the journey,” says Elizabeth Kimani, the manager of quality and standards at Sian Flowers.
As well as controlling the temperature, the atmosphere system in the container reduces the oxygen level from 20 percent to 4 percent, while increasing the carbon dioxide level from 0.4 percent to 4 percent.
This technology is all part of the elaborate process of preserving the blooms for as long as possible. “Through this [system] you stop all activity in the flowers that, as a result, go into dormancy,” Ms Kimani says, explaining that the flowers are put to sleep.
