Modern Travellers, Eternal Poets: Manon Canto
Manon Canto has been moving since she was old enough to choose where to go. London first, then New York, then back to Paris. With a very clear sense of what each place had left to teach her.
Goldsmiths gave her the formation: business and art history together, which is less of a contradiction than it sounds. New York gave her the scale: she arrived as assistant to Mathieu Templon for the opening of his first American gallery, and left understanding how the machinery of a major programme actually runs. Paris gave her something harder to name. A place to build on her own terms.
She began alongside curator and art advisor Joanna Chevalier, working across the art scenes of the Middle East. Then came CMS Collection, the artist incubator founded by Chevalier, Hervé Mikaeloff and François Sarkozy, where she led international projects for a year and a half. Back in Paris, she founded the contemporary art department at Dupont & Associés, building a programme around the city's emerging scene and its newer collectors. Today she works independently: advising collectors and institutions on acquisitions, building exhibitions, supporting the artists she works alongside.
And then, recently, Vestige. An agency she co-founded on a simple conviction: artists make their mark on cultural memory, and someone needs to do the work of making sure those marks last. Context, relationships and strategy. The unglamorous infrastructure behind what eventually becomes a legacy.
We invited her to join our series Modern Travellers, Eternal Poets, a portrait project by Des Épigraphes.
"A souvenir is never an object. It's a moment, something quietly engraved in time."
Far from store bought souvenirs. More like a conversation, a rhythm, sometimes also a silence.
"Travel memories often resurface unexpectedly, once distance has settled in," she says. "You only realise their value once they're already behind you."
This is also, in some way, how she encounters art. The work that matters rarely sparks in front of you immediately. It's the one you find yourself thinking about weeks later, on an ordinary day, with no particular reason to.
What Manon brings in her bag when she travels
A notebook. A book. Her headphones. And some Des Épigraphes postcards.
Nothing else that she would call essential. A few objects that cross every border with her, holding thoughts and ideas and moments that haven't yet decided what they want to become.
"Times when I felt fully present somewhere unfamiliar. Slightly lost, yet with the strong feeling of being exactly where I was supposed to be."
The memories she holds closest are the quiet ones. What she calls "moments that didn't ask to be documented ".
She describes herself as naturally nostalgic. Someone moved and transported by past experiences, exhibitions, fragments of life that resurface later. Paying attention is her work, and it has long since stopped being something she can switch off when she leaves a room.
"Travel sharpens my attention. Wherever I go, art is my first destination."
Local galleries. Museums. Independent spaces she didn't know existed until she was already inside them. These are her entry points into understanding a place before anything else.
Food comes next. Cooking is her second passion after art, another way of reading a culture through taste and ritual and the particular intimacy of a shared meal.
And then sometimes, in a gallery she stumbled into, she finds an artist she didn't know. "Discovering new artists while travelling feels like finding a treasure," she says. "It feeds my curiosity and often sparks future collaborations." Through the relationships she is still building. Through Vestige. The trip never quite ends.
Paris by Manon Canto
Her Paris is artsy and intimate. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast. Romantic in a very simple way.
Long museum visits. Matcha breaks. Walks through Parc Monceau with her closest friends. But also gallery hopping, studio visits, art fairs. The particular energy of someone always looking for new talent and new conversations. And if possible even new ways of seeing. "A place I move through gently," she says, "even when life around it rushes."
The Musée Bourdelle on days when she needs quiet (she calls it "un jardin secret au coeur de Paris", a secret garden in the heart of Paris). The Grand Palais for its monumentality. Café Joa in the Marais between two work pauses. The Cercle de l'Union Interalliée, which she describes as authentically familial and culturally alive; library, lectures, encounters, a feutré Paris that is still alive.
Attention, for Manon Canto, is not a passive act. Noticing things is its own form of work. A silence in a gallery. An artist in an unfamiliar city. And of course the memory that surfaces weeks after the fact. Slow and cumulative.
She moves through Paris gently. Through the art world, considerably less so.
