THE LIVING ARCHIVE

The Living Archive (TLA) is an open-source digital repository where participants preserve and share memory objects—and the stories they carry.

These objects may honor someone else, reflect personal milestones, or highlight a beloved pastime. Each profile becomes a space for memory, reflection, and connection.

TLA is intentional, cultural, and curated through memory. It’s participatory, storytelling-centered, and grounded in community. It invites people to choose, reflect, and tell a story about what they’re preserving—transforming memory from passive data into something active, meaningful, and witnessed.

Whether through grief, joy, or celebration, The Living Archive holds space for it all. It’s part oral history, part digital scrapbooking. While it embraces the complexity of loss, it also makes room for levity, wonder, and fun.

A NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER: VANESSA HOCK

I am a professional archivist. But really, I’ve been an archivist all my life.

As a child, I kept treasure boxes filled with seashells, dried flowers, figurines, and family photos. As a teenager, I filled journals with accompanying mixtapes and photos. I spent college working in a library, scouring the dustiest books because surely, they held treasures too, things I could only hope to see and touch and hear. In my work as a photographer, I document lives, stories, and places to share cultural perspectives. Later, I began to travel and filled my backpack with plane tickets, new currencies, post cards, and viles of sand from deserts around the world.

In my professional life, I’ve learned the importance of getting things right when preserving memory. There are established guidelines for titling objects in an archive—name, date, place, context. It’s not enough to write “Woman writing, c.1900s”—we research, verify, and revise: “Gertrude Stein writing a letter to Hemingway, 1920.”

That practice got me thinking: how would we title the everyday objects we keep in our own lives? How would we describe a loved one’s teacup, a ticket stub from a concert, or a voicemail we’ve saved for years? These are vernacular objects—personal, quiet, rarely seen—and they tell stories too.

This project was born from the desire to honor those stories, and the ways we each become archivists of our own lives.