This keynote presentation, delivered at the History/Reality #3: Engaging with the Attic Archive Symposium (NIVAL, Dublin, April 2025), explores the idea of archiving as an autonomous, artistic practice and the challenge of incorporating such an archive into institutional collections through the lens of the Attic Archive—a radical, four-decade-long living artwork initiated by Scottish artist Pete Horobin in 1980. Resistant to institutional norms and economic constraints, the archive began as DATA (Daily Action Time Archive), a durational conceptual work through which the artist meticulously documented their everyday life over a decade. Evolving across multiple artistic identities—Pete Horobin, Marshall Anderson, Peter Haining, and aitch—this ongoing project reflects a continuous process of 'self-historification', artistic production over 40 years, and now dispersed across institutional collections in Scotland, Ireland, and Hungary.
The presentation examines the Attic Archive's autonomous ethos and resistance to traditional archival and curatorial logic, emphasising its indivisibility and networked, living nature. Through oral histories, artist interviews, and collaboration with multiple institutions, the authors reflect on their efforts to reconceptualise archival practices via their research project Curating the Digital Attic Archive. Central to the project is developing an open-source digital platform that reinstates the archive's unity and supports new creative engagement. The presentation situates the archive within contemporary debates on counter-cultural memory, networked art, and post-digital preservation, highlighting the challenges and potential of sustaining artist-led archives as active, generative, and anti-hegemonic spaces in the post-digital age.