Laurie Anderson's next manuscript will stay unread until 2114 in Oslo's Future Library

Laurie Anderson's next manuscript will not be read in her lifetime. The American artist has been named the 13th contributor to Future Library, the Oslo project that locks unread texts in a silent room until 2114 and plans to print them on paper milled from trees planted for that date.

Katie Paterson, the Scottish artist who started the work in 2014, said Anderson's submission may be a text, a score, a story, a set of instructions or something for which we do not yet have a name. That is the point of the commission. The library does not require a novel. It requires a sealed object that can wait 88 years.

The manuscripts sit in a purpose-built room in Deichman Bjørvika, the main public library between Oslo Central Station and the Opera House. One hundred drawers were designed for the century. Twelve were already filled. Anderson takes the thirteenth. Visitors can see the names and the closed drawers. They cannot open them.

The list already holds Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Han Kang, Karl Ove Knausgård, Ocean Vuong, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Judith Schalansky, Valeria Luiselli, Tommy Orange and Amitav Ghosh. Orange and Ghosh handed their manuscripts over in a forest ceremony at the end of June. Anderson now joins that line.

The paper plan is as concrete as the drawers. In 2014 Paterson planted 1,000 spruce trees in Nordmarka, north of the city. In 2114 those trees are meant to be cut and turned into the paper for a collected edition of 100 texts. The Trust that holds the project has to keep a forest, a room and a legal structure alive across governments, library directors and climate shifts that the original planting could not forecast.

Anderson, 79 this year, is known first as a performer and composer. She won a Grammy. Her visual work has been shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. She has said her mother taught her to love books. The Future Library brief asks her to write for readers who have not been born and who will handle a physical book made from trees that are now saplings.

The project is a bet on continuity. It assumes Oslo still has a public library in 2114, that the Nordmarka stand is still there to harvest, and that someone still wants to print an anthology on paper. It also assumes that a manuscript can be interesting after the author's death and after every living critic has gone. Those are not small assumptions. They are the material of the piece.

Paterson has described the work as a contract with people she will never meet. Each annual invitation extends that contract by one name. Anderson's selection was announced on Saturday as Norway buries King Harald V and watches a new reign begin. The library room does not mark that change. The drawers stay shut either way.

No excerpt will be released. No title has been given. The only public fact is the name on the drawer and the date on the lock. Readers who want the text will have to wait until 2114, or trust that the Trust lasts long enough to print it.