The Museum of the World, by Emanuele Coccia, 2024

An ancient legend says that before founding Rome, the city he intended to last forever, Romulus – twin son of a woman raped by the local war deity Mars, abandoned under a tree and suckled by a she-wolf – decided to dig a circular trench and deposit within it “first-fruits of all things that are reckoned good and necessary” (Plutarch, Rom.11.2). This ritual space on which Rome was built, legend tells us, gave the Latin name for “world”, mundus. 

This legend reveals the essential nature of the act that gives rise to cities. A city is more than the juxtaposition of human beings on a contiguous portion of land, or the mere sharing of land or sky. To truly found a city its inhabitants must share the best parts of their reality – a world. 

Every city, in a sense, is the re-enactment of this act of gathering the best part of what exists. An exercise in cosmogonic improvisation. There is only perhaps one important difference: over time cities have evolved from being built upon the first-fruits of the world, to actively producing, displaying and flaunting them. The city has become the laboratory in which the world improves and refines itself, becoming first-fruits and making itself precious and rare. 

From this perspective, a city is much closer to a museum or library than we may think. It is a place where heterogeneous and disparate objects, sounds, atmospheres, forms and gestures come out of their usual context and, for a limited time, engage in a secret and barely perceptible dialogue. A museum, like a city, is an improvised enclosure that separates a place from the rest of reality, allowing a miracle, in the theological sense, to take place within its boundaries. It creates a space-time where the usual order of things is suspended, and elements associate in different ways, defying the traditional sequence of cause and effect. 

Removed from their habitual position, objects release a new truth. This truth is not merely the object’s voice that was imperceptible in other contexts. The miracle lies elsewhere: what emerges is a radically different, choral, oceanic voice that no longer belongs specifically to any individual exhibit. Side by side, artefacts give life to an alternative world that shines precisely because of its ephemeral nature. 

Unlike the miracles of ancient mythologies, the end of this miracle does not coincide with a return to the previous state. When the prodigy’s grace fades and time returns to its hinges, the objects remain infected by their exchange. Just as a magnet orients iron filings from afar, a museum weaves into the fabric of reality another order that forever alters the world’s essence. An arbitrary collection of forms becomes the matrix of the future, the womb and bud of a world to come. 

Relevantly, the operation legends attribute to the origin of cities bears the same name used in many Latin languages to designate the world: mundus. While the term derived from ancient Greek, kosmos, refers to the semantic area of decoration, the Latin term refers to the process of purification, distillation, reduction to essence. A world never coincides with the brute fact of reality, the existence of something alone does not give rise to a world. 

Contrary to what we often imagine and repeat, living things do not simply adapt to reality. They do not merely modify it, but select it as much as the environment selects them. We cannot exist without choosing, selecting, and gathering as much good as possible. Only through this act does the sharing of life and identification with a place become possible. 

A twofold operation is necessary: the selection of something (a thinning, a pruning) and its concentration in one place. What we call the world can never be complete and exhaustive; it is not the totality of the real. No totality is ever final: it misses those who have disappeared and are yet to be born. A world is always an anthology, a selection. 

This is why a world is always artificial: something produced and ephemeral. Conversely, the necessity of choice is less a matter of a physical order than of moral order. Choice does not produce what is, it produces what is best. This moral increase, this amplification of good, transforms the real, what already exists, into a world. Space and time become a world only when a place and a moment succeed in concentrating what is best for us. The concentration of all the good that one needs to transform one’s existence, the lives of those around us, and our surroundings – every exhibition, every desire for the world – stems from a moral imperative. It is not a question of an inane desire to accumulate wealth, nor of pure economy: it is a matter of selecting that which allows reality to ascend from the brute fact of existence to a higher plane of being, a state we can only designate through the comparative of the most important adverb in our language: better. 

Every city is evidence that we cannot better ourselves without transforming the world, even if it is only a matter of recombining its order. There is no morality that can think of itself as a purely immaterial or spiritual practice: the good of our lives, our happiness, is always mixed with the flesh of the world. No morality that can speak of the self without soiling it with the forms, colours, texture and weaving of the cosmos. Conversely, every portion of our world, regardless of its latitude or richness, is always inhabited as demonically by an “I” that seeks its happiness within it.

All cities (and all museums) are attempts to bring forth a world from the still acosmic real. Conversely, it is only through them that we can not only create but also know a world. Therefore, they can never be mere instruments of preservation or reproduction of the existing. They are always incubators, cocoons in which reality excludes what it wants to shed and sketches its new face, gives new form to its body. 

They are the antithesis of a cosmogram, an artefact that condenses, miniaturises and represents the entire cosmos, allowing us to understand and orient ourselves within it. Unlike a map, which is only true because what it represents is autonomous from it, an exhibition is a physical portion of reality that, through it, becomes the world, and is true only by virtue of this material continuity, at once magnetic and carnal, with the rest. This is precisely why it is always the beginning of a metamorphosis and never nostalgia, even when it exhumes or resurrects the past. 

THE FOREST OF THE FUTURE

Katie Paterson’s Future Library seems to take this same gesture and subject it to a threefold twist. First, the museum transforms into a library: rather than a collection of the first-fruits of the world – objects, people, living beings – it becomes a collection of dreams. 

Contrary to popular belief, books and words are the diurnal and secular form of dreams. It does not matter whether they are novels, essays, confessions, reports, shopping lists, or law texts; whether they are bound or on scattered sheets; what language they are written in. Words are the cocoon that transforms a dream into our new experience, if only for a few hours. Through these physical bodies, dreams become as bright as sunlight. To read is always to illuminate oneself with this dream light. 

This is neither a metaphor nor an allegory. Dreams are not mere imaginations. They are not figures of illusion. They are exercises in psychic gymnastics in which we succeed, for a moment, in becoming what we imagine. When we dream of a bird of paradise in flight we are simultaneously that animal, but also the sky, the tone of the light, the sound of the wings opening and striking the air. 

The dream is the marriage between a self and reality, celebrated by an image. We return to this strange chamber of the spirit because each time we merge with what we imagine, desire is released in its purest forms. Yet, there is something unspeakably painful about the fact that this experience is often possible only during the night. Usually, we can only dream when our eyes are closed, when we have severed the daytime experience from the self. Books break the ghettoization of our dreams in the darkness of the night. Books are dreams transformed into daytime experience, watermarks of wakefulness. Reading and listening allow us to make our flesh indistinguishable from what we have imagined ourselves to be. Daytime dreaming, open eye facing open eye. To bury the dreams of humanity is to found a city made of the same substance that dreams are made of. 

Secondly, Future Library does not found a city in a spatial sense. The founding and opening territory is time. 

We often think of politics as something that binds us to space, not in the physical sense, but an ideal which we project onto the Earth’s surface, recognizing imaginary distinctions, phantasms, and illusions that allow us to believe that the same body of the Earth belongs to different communities. To dispel and dissolve this illusion, Future Library envisions

 a museum and a city that lives only in time and makes its act of birth something future rather than a past event, something we are preparing rather than something we remember. We are citizens of time, and not of space: but this is so only because the planet’s substance is time and not mere extension. We should stop talking about geography and start talking about geochrony: living beings do not merely occupy space, but multiply times, making otherwise incompatible eras and calendars coexist. 

Finally, there is a third element of novelty. The future city founded by Future Library is no longer purely human, it is composed of all the world’s species. A new Noah’s ark built not to save the world from a catastrophic flood but to make all life forms a permanent flood of life. From this perspective Future Libraryis the perfect answer to what we have called the Anthropocene. 

The Anthropocene has often been described as the movement by which we have invaded all space, made the entire planet our home, expanded to the point where we directly or indirectly occupy so much of the world and so much of the Earth that there is no space left. But the opposite could also be said: the planet has invaded our homes to such an extent that in our living rooms, bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms live not only partners, children, and perhaps a dog, cat or forsythia, but every other living species. All species, even those least like us, have become pets, houseplants, bacteria, or companion fungi. We are called to share a one-bedroom apartment with them and learn to love them as we love dogs and cats. We cannot move; there is nowhere else to go. Other species cannot leave their homes either. This library is the museum of the dream, and of all species, and the beginning of a city that is home to all of them. It is their and our collective daydream.