Memory of Mankind

Some of the first writing this civilization ever made was pressed into clay, and much of it survived because the clay was fired, sometimes by the very blaze that destroyed the city around it.

Five thousand years later, a ceramicist in the Austrian Alps took the lesson literally. From 2012 Martin Kunze began to fire texts and pictures onto square ceramic tablets, twenty centimetres a side: some printed in colour, others covered with lines of writing so small that a lens is needed to read them. Once glazed and fired, they fear neither water nor fire nor acid.

He chose to keep them in the salt mine above Hallstatt, a mountain people have worked for salt since prehistory. Salt dries the air and slowly closes its own cracks.

Anyone may send a text: a family story, a trade, a regret. Institutions have taken an interest too, among them those charged with nuclear waste, which must warn a very distant future.

So that the way to the archive is not forgotten, small clay tokens bearing a map are meant to pass from grandparents to grandchildren, and their keepers to meet every fifty years.