The Value of an Archive

In this section, we return to individual issues of HeartattaCk and reflect on why it is worth making these zines available in the present.

Let’s be honest. Who knows what the value of an archive might be? Is this just an exercise in nostalgia for individuals revisiting their youth? Is that even a bad thing? But surely this is not the only thing that an archive might do. What about people who are discovering these zines for the first time? What might HeartattaCk mean to those readers?

Assessing the value of an archive – especially one meant to last – will always be as foolish as trying to predict the future. But that doesn’t mean we can’t reflect on the value of a punk zine archive in the present.

The articles below come from a class on punk culture at UBC in 2018. This is a bit like an experiment. What does reading archived issues of HeartattaCk mean to people who did not grow up in the 90s hardcore scene that HeartattaCk documents? Some of them identified with punk; some of them were on the punk-rock-spectrum as animal rights advocates, artists, or left-wing thinkers. They all found the ideas and conversations they discovered in HeartattaCk to resonate with them almost 20 years later.