The multiplicity of contemporary art practices makes us reflect on their archivability, on the role of “institutions”, and of a differiation of creation and production contexts which today constitute the contemporary art field. The temporal dimension, between generative and growth processes, memory, forgetting and removal, and that of the ephemeral, and the transformative, emphasized by the role of media as “sensitive environment” is transforming the archive which should embrace the complexity of the documentary flux, its continuum and “materiality”. The paper, starting with a mapping of the debate on art and archive, aims to reflect on the interrelations between artists, institutions as museums, formal and informal communities involved in participatory-based projects, just to verify, starting to the specific contexts, how the changing panorama of artists’ practices is modelling the archive and viceversa, and if such conditions could induce historians to question the archival principles of evidence, provenance, integrity, authorial.