Guardians of Montreal Art
ARCMTL’s Preservation and Support of Indie Arts
Expozine 2019 - Photo by Jean-Michel Seminaro
With the rise of streaming services trading the security of physical media for the convenience of instant access, preservation has become a hot topic. Everyone is feeling regret for not hoarding things like tickets or CDs. Thankfully, organizations like ARCMTL exist. They’re a non-profit that has focused on preserving and promoting Montreal’s indie scene for the last three decades. It has served as a vital cultural hub for the city. I had the honor of talking to the archive’s current director, Louis Rastelli. We discussed ARCMTL’s history and the importance of preservation especially in the face of fast changing society.
ARCMTL is the brainchild of eight individuals who grew up in the punk and indie scene, watching firsthand as those scenes dwindled. By their early 30s, there were very few places left for artists to meet. It wasn’t just about a gap in the market, it meant a loss for creatives who used local businesses like bookstores, nightclubs, etc. to create community. Indie bookstores were more open to carrying self-published books and zines. Without a place to share their work, many artists left for cities like Toronto. It was part of a bigger issue, a struggling economy, leading to several businesses shutting down. So, they created the archive in 1998.
The organization relies on three pillars to uphold their mandate: the archive (a.k.a the document centre), community outreach (festivals and activities), and grants. With all three ventures working symbiotically, it makes ARCMTL more aligned with an art centre than a traditional archive. First, there’s the documentation centre. It’s not just for historians writing a book. Whether you're a student writing a paper and can’t find the information you need from larger institutions, or a director making a documentary, the archive is welcome to all. (You just have to make an appointment first.)
They receive media through mostly word of mouth. They’ll receive a call or an email from someone wanting to donate their deceased relatives collection or people moving buildings with no use for their old documents. But they don’t just take anything. Documents must be sifted through since they only take media from indie artists. Rarely do they get anything from the mainstream unless it’s something from early in the career of an act like Arcade Fire. They also have a lot of documents from the events they hold themselves. Currently, the archive's focus is catching up with technology.
“The challenge now is how do we carry on archiving the documentations of concerts and festivals when half of them aren’t printing posters or flyers anymore. There’s not really any archive that has really figured out how to systematically save event Facebook pages. So, that’s a challenge.”
ARCMTL is constantly creating new events and fairs to promote local artists. They’ve mostly been focusing on book fairs that focus on niche audiences. These are people that would be considered too “out there” for a festival like the Salon du Livre. There, unknown creatives get to display their work while networking with authors/publishers wanting to collaborate.
Their first, and consistently biggest festival, Expozine, was established in 2002. The goal of the festival was to foster zine culture in Montreal, but includes all types of small publications (e.g. books, graphic novels, and more). The fair is currently in its 22nd year and continues to grow. More than 270 vendors are present for this two-day event and twice as many apply. It’s one of the biggest issues facing Expozine today. As the fair becomes more and more popular, ARCMTL doesn’t have the space to welcome everyone. For the last few years, they’ve looked into bigger spaces to host the fair. Sadly, the city of Montreal has turned a hard task almost impossible. The current administration, Projet Montreal, wishes to focus on the environment, so a lot of projects unfortunately do not fall into that category, and aren’t a priority.
ARCMTL also operates Distriboto, which is a collection of vending machines that distributes mini-zines all over the island. The project gives new life to vending machines that would have been sent to the dump. They then select a variety of small artists who print dozens of their own zines to go into these machines. Each zine is sold at a reasonable $2 and most of the profits go to the artist. These machines play a large part in maintaining print art along with their fairs. Zines and printed material are often perceived as a lesser form of art. However, it’s often how artists get their foot in the door. Distriboto machines were once very prominent at local libraries, but due to the pandemic, many of their machines were shut down. You can still find them in several metro stations, though, like Berri-UQAM.
Most of the ARCMTL’s funding comes from grants. These grants cover everything from their festivals and events, to their archive. But it’s not always easy. In fact, it can be very difficult. At times, art councils don’t always see the value of their ideas. Which makes securing funding for festivals close to impossible at times. Community collaboration is important, too. Drawn and Quarterly, for example, was one of the earliest partners that helped organize Expozine when it originally launched, particularly with grant support. And ARCMTL is still fighting for funding to launch other book fairs, such as a fair for art books specifically.
“We have a lot of partnerships that have evolved throughout many many years. It’s not so much I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine, we send each other support letters for our different grants all through the year.”
This past May, ARCMTL successfully brought back the Montreal Printed Arts Festival (FAIMTL). The festival was established in 2016 and was last held in 2022. The festival is specifically geared towards print making, which is one of the more accessible art forms. Though the festival was in collaboration with the Grande Print Faire, ARCMTL is running the festival on their own. The festival was originally bi-annualy, but sadly, for the last three years, the organization has had trouble getting funding. Thankfully, they were recently able to receive a grant and the festival is now being run annually.
As Montreal’s art scene continues to grow, ARCMTL will continue to be here to support it. It’s hard to get your foot in the door as a young artist, especially when you don’t know when to start. Organisations like ARCMTL are vital within a society that doesn’t see art as essential, and it’s important that they be supported, even with the smallest actions. If for nothing else, because their archive works to create a full historical record of Montreal’s artistic past.
To learn more about ARCMTL’s expansive work, visit their website.
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