Letter to the Future is a 1,000-year collaboration with ice to provoke consideration of our present and the possibilities for our future.
Contemporary thinkers across disciplines have written a letter to the future that has been put inside a time capsule and deposited in a glacier in the Dronning Maud Land in Antarctica. It is anticipated that the container will emerge in roughly 1,000 years. Except for the authors themselves, no one from the present has seen the letters.
I have called upon a wide variety of voices across disciplines to write a handwritten letter to the future. The contributors have written their letters with archival materials and each author has chosen their language; some have made drawings. Letter to the Future brings together cultural, philosophical, environmental, and scientific collaborators in a work carried by ice and time. The work is beyond any one individual, both in time scale and in ideologies, and it is beyond the human. The substances of the planet are vital materials of this work, which asks us to imagine with renewed sensitivity our time and our place in the history of the earth as the messages withdraw into the future.
Letter to the Future is an affirmative gesture that provokes consideration of the state of our times and the possibilities for our future. It asks people to consider oneself in the context of the planet – in relation and in responsibility. If the present is both a record of what we are ceasing to be and what we are in the process of becoming, Letter to the Future is a proposal to build knowledge across a human and beyond-human spectrum, in convergence with ice and time.