Which artistic works can and should we preserve for the future? What structural conditions are needed to ensure the scope for both preserving the old and enabling the new? With the sheer amount of art constantly increasing while space becomes ever scarcer, Austria's Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft (BIG) faces major challenges when it comes to preserving the artistic works in and around its properties. An interdisciplinary conference, organised by BIG in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts Vienna, served to bring together experts from a variety of fields and to illuminate the issue of the preservation and archiving of art in public spaces from different perspectives. This publication was published as a review and extension of the conference "The Archiving of the presence" about dealing with art in public spaces, that was held in November 2021 in Vienna.