Forget me not

When unshakeable anxieties clamour for our attention in the present, what does it take to create for the next century?

- By NIKITA BISWAL.

A winding trail strays from a skiing path in Oslo’s Nordmarka forest. Rocky and hedged on both sides by dense wilderness, it opens into a clearing of Norwegian spruce trees. A signboard calls this Framtidsbiblioteket, or Future Library. The trees were planted by conceptual artist Katie Paterson, and will one day be used to print a particularly unusual collection of books. Every year since 2014, the Future Library Trust has invited a writer to contribute a manuscript that will remain unpublished until 2114, when the trees are a hundred years old. This summer, acclaimed India-born writer Amitav Ghosh takes up the gauntlet—following the likes of Margaret Atwood, Elif Shafak, Han Kang and Ocean Vuong.

For the next 88 years, Ghosh’s manuscript, fittingly titled Letter to My Grandson, will be preserved in one of the hundred drawers tucked into the wood-panelled walls of The Silent Room. A space Paterson designed at the public library Deichman Bjørvika, it resembles the insides of the spruce trees growing on the other side of the fjords in Nordmarka, which the room looks towards.