Il signore della seta

"The last key link is the Canada Council. In 1970 the Canada Council instituted the travel grant, which allowed artists to travel for projects, openings or research to other parts of the country (and elsewhere). Now much has been made of the Canada Council as the enlightened institution it is, largely because of its funding of artists and artist-run spaces, but at this time the crucial elements in creating a Canadian art scene was the travel grant. Suddenly we were all traveling. Now Image Bank's image network weakened as it was replaced by actual contact, actual projects together. And this possibility of traveling across this five-thousand mile linear network, this possibility of traveling in a straight line and meeting almost everyone made the art scene in Canada what it is today: now suddenly all these characters in this epic plot began to intertwine into that Rococo form of bureaucracy called Canadian art today. Suddenly we had a sense of seeing ourselves as beings seeing each other, sensing each other as beings sensing themselves as beings seeing each other. And that is the importance of travel."
— A.A. Bronson, The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat