BY Agathe Soldat & Jia Schofer
Diego Lopez has always wanted to create his own clothing line and leave a mark on Montreal’s fashion industry. What started as sketches and ideas in his room quickly became a project that was about more than just unleashing his creativity.
“I know that there are a lot of upcoming artists here in Montreal,” he says. “But I have always wanted to create my own line, and hopefully become a part of Montreal’s growing culture.”
After creating his own brand, HXLLW, in 2025, Lopez made it his priority to keep every drawing, design, sketch, and project he has ever created, despite mostly using his computer to promote his work.
“For me, it’s about building something bigger and keeping traces of my work to share its story and growth over time,” Lopez says. “The majority of my marketing is done online, but I try to archive everything I have ever done, especially my sketches and first ideas, because that’s where everything started.”
For many years, Montreal has had an ever-growing presence in the arts and culture sectors. Whether through music, fashion, or the arts, emerging artists have shared their work at events, festivals, exhibits, and online platforms.
Non-profit organization ARCMTL is one of many to promote and preserve local, independently created culture. Founded in 1998, ARCMTL has made it its mission over the years to document the city’s underground arts and cultural scenes.
Louis Rastelli is the director of the non-profit organization. He says they are currently focusing on multiple projects to highlight different communities in Montreal.
Louis Rastelli holding an archived journal dating from 1971, one of the many archived in the ARCMTL centre. Photo by Agathe Soldat.
“We came up with a project funded by Heritage Canada called Owning Our Histories: A Look at DIY Archives and History Projects in Montreal, which promotes BIPOC and queer communities,” says Rastelli. “We mounted a program of activities, roundtable discussions, and visits to small archives and there’s a lot of importance to us doing this.”
As part of the Owning Our Histories project, ARCMTL puts on exhibits that highlight the role of zines in documenting these communities.
“The goal of this exhibit was to highlight zines as a way of documenting the kind of personal experiences, political movements and underground culture of queer and BIPOC communities,” says Chloe Martin, who works with ARCMTL. “That’s why zines are this cool, underground niche medium for all of these histories that might be less represented in mainstream libraries and museums.”
One of ARCMTL’s most well-known projects is Expozine, an international independent publishing festival. Every year, the event welcomes hundreds of publishers, artists and creators looking to share their work with the public.
Expozine’s 2025 poster at ARCMTL. Photo by Agathe Soldat.
“When we first started the organization, the archives were mostly a growing pile of boxes, but we want to start creating projects to promote artists,” says Rastelli. “Expozine is the biggest one, so for 25 years, we probably acquired more than 10,000 publications from the artists that take part in our fair.”
Nadia Zawil is an arts educator and multidisciplinary artist. She says that working in galleries and museums, and teaching art, has taught her that much art goes unnoticed if not archived.
“When you see things firsthand, you start to understand that a lot of meaningful work simply doesn’t survive because it never had the right advocate in the right room,” says Zawil. “Archiving, to me, becomes an act of resistance against that; it’s a way of saying this existed, this mattered.”
She explains that it is with the work of organizations like ARCMTL that art and culture can survive in today’s society and for those to come.
“Independent efforts like zines, archives and community documentation matter so much because art is one of the most honest records we have of how people lived, and once it’s gone, that testimony is gone with it.”
Archived zines and books stored on shelves at ARCMTL. Photo by Agathe Soldat.
She says this belief and approach are put forward in her line of work.
“I work as an art editor in a zine, and we specifically seek out artists who haven’t been featured elsewhere yet and who have strong cultural perspectives,” says Zawil. “A lot of these artists are marginalized voices whose work deserves a record, and having their work included in a zine ensures it gets documented and archived for the future.”
According to Rastelli, ARCMTL prioritizes redirecting donations of material that do not fit its mandate to libraries or other archival centres. He says that this helps ensure that the material that needs archiving is preserved.
With a growing number of archive centers in Montreal, a sense of collaboration has developed between them. From the Mohawk archives and community center in Kahnawake to the Centre d’interpretation, Documentation International Afro-Caribbean et haitien, many communities are working to preserve their own histories and cultural records.
Archive centres and organizations: Detailed map of all independent archive centers in Montreal and Kahnawake. Map by Agathe Soldat.
“There’s a real network of small archives,” says Rastelli. “The communities should be able to have the resources to gather their own archives, manage their own archives, without a gatekeeper or intermediary, and they should get the resources to do it.”
Places around the city, like the Centre des arts actuels SKOL, interrogate the importance of an archive in preserving artifacts for certain communities. By showcasing artists who question what it means to be left out of an archive through their exhibition, Reveiller l’androgyne, SKOL underscores the importance of community exchange in preserving history.
The collective exhibition Réveiller L’Androgyne at the Centre des arts actuels SKOL, where nine queer artists revisit the legacy of L’Androgyne, Québec’s first gay, lesbian, and feminist bookstore which closed in 2002. Video by Jia Schofer.
While organizations play a key role in preserving culture, artists like Corina Vincelli also contribute to how it is created and remembered.
“Preserving art is important because it tells us where we are in our timeline,” says Vincelli. “My first album is like a collection of everything, and it’s almost like a diary where we can see how things evolve and change.”
Vincelli is a singer who works in the musical theatre community as a music director and pianist. She has performed her songs at concerts and has also been part of musicals such as Bonnie and Clyde, Guys and Dolls, A Chorus Line, and others at the Segal Centre.
She explains that Montreal is an art and music city where people want to go see concerts, live music and performances. She says that having the necessary technology to record these events is essential for archiving and preservation.
“In the early 1900s, with Bluegrass music, we finally had some technology to record the music,” says Vincelli. “That taught us about how people lived, and about their situation, socio-economic situations, class distinctions, and I think that this is so important.”
Diego Lopez drawing on his brand’s sketchbook. Photo by Agathe Soldat.
As artists across different artistic and cultural fields grow in number, ensuring their work is documented and not lost over time is a growing concern for Lopez. He believes that taking the time to document and keep track of one’s creative process is crucial to preserving art and culture in the long run.
“I think that it’s important for artists to keep what they create, even in the early stages of their careers,” says Lopez. “I hope that, in the future, they will start archiving more and show where everything came from and how their art evolved as part of Montreal’s culture.”
