Inauguration speech (excerpted)
By Sylvia Torti
October 20, 2024
College of the Atlantic
Thank you to College of the Atlantic’s Board of Trustees, led by Beth Gardiner. Thank you to the past presidents of College of the Atlantic who are here with us today: Steve Katona, David Hales, Andy Griffith, and Darron Collins. It is because of your leadership that COA is what it is today. I have immense appreciation for the COA community. Faculty—both current and emeriti—hard-working staff, our alumni, students, families, and friends. I value the ways that you attend to and sustain the vibrancy of this place. You are College of the Atlantic.
As I was preparing for today, I remembered a work of art that, to me, epitomizes College of the Atlantic—the vision of its founders, its present-day life, and its future existence.
Let me take you on an imaginary journey.
The year is 2114. You’re in Norway, because there is still a country called Norway, and you’re there either for work or for pleasure, because there is still both work and pleasure in 2114. You stop in at the library in Oslo. Across the room you see a pale wooden wall with a curious oval entrance. You approach the wall and read a sign. It says if you take off your shoes, you may enter. You step barefoot through a constricted hallway made of this same wood to find yourself inside a small room, a room that makes you feel like you’re inside the trunk of a tree. As you look around, you see that, set into the wood of the walls from floor to ceiling, are locked glass drawers, and when you peer through the glass, you see that each drawer holds a manuscript.
You are standing inside a 100-year work of art, which was conceived of and put into motion in the year 2014 by a young Scottish artist named Katie Paterson. In 2014, Katie Paterson was 21. When you visit this room in 2114, she has been dead for some time.
Let’s now ask our imaginations to roll backwards, back to 2014, when Katie was 21. She was contemplating ecology and time and our capacity to imagine, and make real, a future beyond ourselves. She used her imagination to conceive of this artwork called Future Library.
What did she do?
First, she convinced the Norwegian government to let her cut down a plot of forest, to take the harvested wood and use it to build a beautiful small room, called Silent Room, within Oslo’s library. She then returned to the cleared forest with a team of people, and they planted 1,000 spruce trees. Those saplings are growing and will grow for 100 years.
Next, she approached the Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood, and asked her to write an original manuscript, a book that no one would read for 100 years, a book that would become the first of 100 books to be collected in Future Library. The only direction was that Atwood consider the themes of imagination and time.
Every year since 2014, another writer has been chosen by a committee to write a book that will be held in trust for the future.
Katie then created a thousand copies of a print depicting a cross section of a tree with 100 growth rings, and she sold them as certificates, thereby raising funds to support the project. Individuals who purchased an art piece, or certificate, will pass it onto someone in the next generation.
In 2114, the drawers will be unlocked. The spruce trees will be felled, and their pulp used to create paper on which these books, hidden for a century in the case of Margaret Atwood’s book, and only for a year in the case of the last author chosen, will be published. All holders of the certificate will receive an anthology of 100 books.
Consider this. Katie Paterson wasn’t only thinking about ecology and how to push us beyond the narrow scope of a human lifespan, she was also thinking about the value of human institutions. She created a foundation to oversee the project. She negotiated a 100-year legal agreement with the city of Oslo. She considered financial sustainability.
The foundation, which will change members every 10 years, is not only responsible for choosing authors, but also for the maintenance of the forest, for the ongoing expenses, for caretaking the artwork’s charter, and for allowing change while protecting the essence of Katie’s vision. The current stewards must trust one another and entrust the project to people they’ll never meet.
This is a deeply human-ecological piece of work.
Future Library hinges on faith in our shared humanity and trust in our ability to shape the future for good. In order for Future Library to exist now—as well as in the future—Katie Paterson, and all of the authors and stewards, have to believe that 100 years from now the forest will still stand, that it will have survived shifts in climate, that it will not have burned, been cut, or consumed by disease. They have to believe that in 100 years there will still be libraries, that we will have technologies for making paper, and artists who know how to print. And most importantly, they have to believe that there will still be a desire to read and learn from books.
College of the Atlantic is a meta-version of Future Library.
