This week we visited the artist Athena Mothership’s exhibition Library Mothership to talk all things archiving, preservation and all things print.
In an era dominated by temporary, cloud-based media and fleeting digital streams, the risk of losing our cultural heritage has never been higher. Digital print, zines, local histories, and independent publications are constantly at risk of vanishing behind broken links, platform migrations, or paywalls. To combat this quiet loss, Athena Mothership curated the Library Mothership, a dedicated archiving project built to ensure that modern digital-native media and print history remain accessible for generations to come.
The core mission driving the project today is democratised preservation. Rather than relying solely on massive, centralised institutions to decide what is worth saving, Library Mothership champions the idea that digital archiving should be accessible, sustainable, and community-driven.
Watch the full interview about the exhibition below.
One of the key technical and philosophical challenges of building a long-term archive is scale. How do you digitize millions of rare zines, family histories, and community documents scattered across the globe?
The answer lies in home-scanning. Home-scanning completely transforms the traditional institutional dynamic of archiving: It removes the gatekeeping often found in formal institutions, and allows individuals to preserve their own local histories, subcultures, and family artifacts from their living rooms.
By empowering individuals to scan their own collections, Library Mothership helps build a distributed, resilient network of preserved media.
Beyond the technical hardware and file formats, archiving is deeply human. The spark that drives a project like this often starts small, perhaps with a single, fragile local zine or an old family photograph that captures a forgotten moment in time.
Working on scanning projects frequently uncovers deeply moving and quirky pieces of history: hand-drawn flyers for underground shows, personal letters tucked inside vintage books, or community newsletters that captured major historical shifts from a grassroots perspective. These unique artifacts remind us why preservation matters, they offer an authentic, unvarnished look at human culture that mainstream history books often miss.
As cloud media becomes more fleeting, exhibitions like Library Mothership show how archiving serves as a vital lifeline for our shared history. Whether you are preserving underground subcultures or digitising your own family archives, every document saved is a victory against digital disappearance.
