The way we gather has shifted.
The conditions of encounter have changed. We move between curated selves, filtered exchanges, and the low-grade exhaustion of never quite saying what we mean. Technology and metropolitan life have organized more of our lives around immediacy, abundance, and excess. Time spent together has become another thing competing for our attention.
Le MEETUP was built as a response to that gap.
We create the conditions for a different kind of encounter, one that begins not with an answer but with a question we have no intention of resolving. From there, meaning gets made collectively, through conversation, disagreement, hesitation, and whatever else happens in the room.
We don't promise resolution. We make room for uncertainty, and see what people do with it.
Intention.
You chose to be here. That choice is the foundation of everything. Being present means introducing yourself to a stranger, sitting with discomfort rather than retreating from it, and contributing to what happens in the room. Le MEETUP doesn't happen to you. It happens because of you.
Exchange.
Exchange only becomes meaningful when something is at stake. Small groups, unexpected formats, and activities approach a question from angles you might not have chosen yourself. Something passes between people: an idea, a disagreement, a way of seeing something differently. You leave having given something and taken something. That transfer is the point.
Listening.
Many of us have learned to wait for our turn to speak rather than listen. At Le MEETUP, listening is not passive. It is part of the work. We practice horizontal communication: no speakers, no panels, no stages. The floor belongs to everyone, which also means paying attention to who takes up space, who doesn't, and when to give it.
EVERY MEETUP STARTS THE SAME WAY
Before
Co-host
Each edition begins with someone from the community. We decide what to question together.
Topic
A question without an obvious answer. You form your opinion in the room.
Cultural objects
Two or three things to think with: a book, a film, an artwork, a song, an exhibition.
In the room
Format
Never the same twice. Small groups, activities, discussion, arranged so something can happen that wouldn't otherwise.
Participation
No lectures. No panels. No passive observers.
What remains
Zine
Each edition leaves the room as an object. You take it home.
Return
Some come back. Some bring others. Some begin making Le MEETUP with us.
Michael Valinsky
President & Creative Director
Michael is a Paris-based French-American writer and cultural organizer. He founded Le MEETUP in 2024 as an ongoing inquiry into how language, bodies, and lived experience shape collective life. Growing up between Paris and New York, Michael has always been attuned to how space, displacement, and identity cohere. Language, for him, is material and method at once: it organizes attention, distributes power, and determines who becomes legible, audible, or welcome in a given space. His training is shaped by psychoanalysis, queer theory, and close reading. At New York University, he argued that words carry physical force before they carry meaning. At the London School of Economics, he examined how three writers represented the AIDS crisis in their work, and how their books shaped what it meant to become a gay man after them, and who got left out of that story. He treats theory as a tool for attunement, sharpening perception and complicating certainty. Le MEETUP structures gatherings that favor slowness over efficiency, intimacy over scale, participation over spectacle, an extension of the same instinct that shaped his relationship to language: attention built collectively, tested in real time, with people who did not arrive with a shared vocabulary.
Marcus Hudson
Programming Coordinator
Marcus was born and raised in Rochester, a Midwestern American city whose influence extends far beyond its size. Growing up an only child in a family rooted in care, planning, and movement, he developed an early sensitivity to people, systems, and the spaces between them. Surrounded by science and international visitors, his curiosity turned outward, less interested in belonging neatly than in understanding how different worlds touch. His encounter with the French language in high school became a turning point, evolving from study into a means of self-repositioning. After degrees in French, English as a foreign language, and education, he began teaching languages in Minnesota and then Brisbane, Australia before arriving in France in 2009, where he then taught in La Rochelle and Tours. Wherever he has lived, his orientation has stayed the same: structure, transmission, and the quiet labor of bringing people together. In 2016, Marcus settled in Paris, moving from language transmission into global communications alongside senior leadership at major international brands. He continued building communities through sport, co-leading running groups and inclusive spaces within rugby. As co-founder of Le MEETUP, he designs frameworks that privilege active listening over performance, and cohesion over consensus.
STAY IN THE LOOP
Subscribe to our newsletter