Our Story

Le MEETUP began with a simple need: to exchange outside the noise of traditional nightlife. We were looking for spaces where conversation could stretch past small talk—where it was possible to slow down, to share, and to be understood.

In a city full of events, few invite you to turn to your left or right and actually meet the people who share the same hunger for connection. Le MEETUP was born from that gap: a desire to create pockets of time where reflection replaces performance and listening carries as much weight as speaking.

Each gathering is an experiment in collective attention. We build spaces where inspiration can effervesce, where judgment softens, and where ideas move through people rather than past them. What began as an attempt to talk has become a quiet commitment: to each other and to the possibility of lasting connection..

Our Mission

Collective Reflection

Le MEETUP begins with a question, not a thesis. We begin in curiosity, not certainty. We gather to explore, allowing meaning to unfold collectively through acts of active listening, rather than defending positions.

Dialogue is our raw material: unpredictable, imperfect, and alive. We gather to slow down, to moments of stillness, and think with each other, weaving personal experiences into broader cultural and social contexts.

Each voice shapes the meaning that emerges, and when they meet, they expand what’s possible. We treat plurality not as noise, but as strength. Our communities shape our perceptions, and through them, who we become.

Reflexivity is at the heart of it: learning to see ourselves within the systems we discuss while recognizing our shared responsibility to one another. It’s the gentle discipline of self-questioning, of letting our perspectives shift through encounter.

Le MEETUP isn’t about finding the answer. It’s about discovering new ways of seeing, leaving each gathering more grounded in our own truth, yet widened by that of others.

What it creates: a culture of listening, curiosity, and co-thinking that turns conversation into a shared act of creation that continues long after the night ends.

Lasting Impact

Cultural objects create a shared point of departure. They can be films, books, songs, and images that carry fragments of the world we’re trying to understand. They are not references but provocations: material signs through which the world writes itself back into the room. They anchor us even as they unsettle any fixed ground, creating a passage between what is lived and what is still becoming.

The exchange doesn’t end when we leave the room. Ideas continue to circulate through our publications, through memory, and in the afterglow of discourse as they reappear in everyday life.

Each encounter becomes both evidence and echo, a trace within an ongoing process of collective meaning-making, where reflection is archived, situated, and carried forward through time.

What it creates: a living archive of thought and feeling, where art and conversation circulate beyond the room and continue shaping how we see, share, and act.

Space as Experiment

Each edition of Le MEETUP is an experiment in form, space, and relation. We design participatory experiences (workshops, performances, role-plays) that move ideas from the intangible to the embodied, from thought into felt experience.

The room itself becomes part of the conversation. Dialogue, disagreement, and connection form its fabric. Knowledge opens to exchange; expertise meets experience; what is learned is built together, not owned alone.

Authority softens here. Meaning drifts between speakers, between gestures, between silences.
Le MEETUP is not a fixed method, but a living choreography of thought—a space that thickens through presence and play, where the unfamiliar becomes a tool for insight.

What it creates: an environment where learning happens through presence and play, and where the unfamiliar becomes a tool for insight.

Our Method

We practice attention as a form of care, anchored in accountability, respect, and a demanding kind of kindness. Each gathering follows a shared framework that keeps the form fluid yet deliberate, allowing intention to guide improvisation.

Organization

Every edition is co-hosted with a member of the community. This rotation keeps perspectives diverse and ensures the event remains a collective effort rather than a fixed program.

Topic Identification

We begin with a question, be it social, cultural, or intimate, that feels urgent in the present moment. The topic guides the evening but never limits it.

Object Selection

We choose two or three cultural objects (such as a film, a text, an image, or a song) as common reference points. They are not subjects to analyze but materials to think and feel through.

Activity Creation

From the topic and its objects, we design an experience—a workshop, game, or experiment—that invites participants to inhabit the theme rather than merely discuss it.

Mediation & Participation

Follow up

Facilitation is light but deliberate. We hold the space so that conversation can unfold both safely and unpredictably, striking a balance between structure and openness. Every attendee is a participant, not an audience.

The MEETUP works through active presence, attentive listening, and the courage to speak from experience. Listening here is not passive — it’s a deliberate act, an agreement to stay present with what is said and with what remains unsaid. We lead with practiced care, empathy, and intentional inclusivity, creating a space that is both open and held — a place where honesty thrives, but never at the expense of care. Kindness, for us, is not the absence of conflict; it’s the presence of respect.

The event doesn’t end when it ends. Insights continue through our publications, archives, and informal exchanges, keeping the conversation alive and evolving.

Our team

Michael Valinsky

Michael Valinsky is a Paris-based writer, content designer, and cultural organizer. He founded Le MEETUP as a space for shared inquiry, where language, bodies, and lived experience are taken seriously, and where conversation is treated as a form of collective work.

Michael’s practice sits at the intersection of theory and practice, structure and feeling. His work is guided by a simple conviction: that language is never neutral, and that how we speak, name, and frame the world shapes who feels welcome, visible, and held within it.

He holds a Master of Science in Gender, Media, and Culture from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in Poetics and Praxis from New York University. Michael approaches language as both material and method. He is interested in how words organize power, how narratives sediment into norms, and how small shifts in attention can open new forms of relation. This perspective informs Le MEETUP’s programming, which favors slowness over spectacle, intimacy over scale, and participation over performance.

Marcus Hudson

Contact us

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