Future Libraries of the Past: Deep Time, Libraries, Capsules and Vaults in Modern and Contemporary Art

The Research Seminar considers the longer history of creative deferral and the material cultivation of artworks that postpone an encounter beyond a lifetime. This is the main pre-occupation of Scottish artist Katie Paterson's Future Library (2014-2114), an extraordinarily ambitious work that annually accumulates one piece of fiction by international writers over a century. It is a complex bargain with the future.

Patrizio’s presentation discuesses Paterson's work alongside those of other artists who are interested in geological time, environmental activism, ahuman duration, space/time and material manipulation. As the arts do not have a monopoly on deferral and waiting, it will also look briefly at science and technology where generations of humans contribute to a witnessing that lasts beyond any individual's life.

The resulting constellation of parallel and past practices gives Katie Paterson's Future Library another context in which to exist, alongside The Silent Room in Deichman Bjørvika and the forest at Nordmarka, Norway.

Andrew Patrizio holds the Established Chair of Scottish Visual Culture at the University of Edinburgh, where he has been based since 1997, and where he also received his doctorate in 1993. Prof. Patrizio teaches and writes on Scottish post-1945 art and on ecological artists, themes and methods, culminating in his book The Ecological Eye: Assembling an ecocritical art history (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Methods for Ecocritical Art History (co-edited with Dr Olga Smith, Manchester University Press, 2026).

Please follow the event also online through our VIMEO CHANNEL: the link will be soon published here

Scientific Organization by Elisabetta Rattalino

_{Image: Katie Paterson, Future Library, 2014-2114. Photo by Kristin von Hirsch, 2023 ©️ Katie Paterson Studi}o