When we think of montage, we almost automatically think of the final stage of the creative process of an audiovisual work. Images and sounds described in a script are assembled into a whole after shooting. We connect montage with a crystallised end result, finishing, fine-tuning. This usual connotation implies a well-defined artistic discipline as well as a well-defined moment. Montage is a notion that belongs to the audiovisual domain and, moreover, mainly comes into play at the end of the creative process. However, can we not say that montage is much more than just the assembling and refining of disparate compositions in a final stage? Does montage not begin much earlier, consciously or unconsciously, in the bringing together of notes, images, musical phrases and motifs - in the pursuit of those fledgling contours of what should one day become a wrought work of art? When and in what ways do reading, watching, listening, writing, playing, conversing, collecting, improvising turn into montage? How can we see montage as a method, a way to begin, to give form? The film form is central here. But to what extent is there also montage in the dramaturgy of a play, the search for a musical or graphic composition, the design of a space, sculpture or installation, in the writing of a text? Don’t we practice montage as spectators or readers? And is historiography not a form of montage?