Communication begins with good intentions. But something always gets lost. You say something. They hear something else. A sentence lands somewhere you never meant it to. Your accent speaks before you do. Your silence speaks sometimes far more than words ever could.
📞 If the phone rings, will you pick up?
Send this to someone you’ve never quite been able to reach.
LE MEETUP #10: Can You Hear Me Now?
Friday May 29 • 19:30–23:30
La Maison de la Conversation, Paris 18
RSVP via link in bio. Spots are limited.
#lemeetup
Friday, March 20, 2026 at @lacaserneparis
Le MEETUP 9 (WHO ARE YOU TO JUDGE?) examined the architecture of conviction. How verdicts are prepared long before a sentence is pronounced, how empathy is unevenly distributed, and how the same facts, differently framed, produced different outcomes.
We put that to the test. 30 people. Two juries. One case. Diverging framings.
What followed was the real conversation: about instinct and persuasion, about who receives context and who is reduced to their act, about punishment, repair, and who gets to decide.
Objects considered:
- Saint Omer (2022) by #alicediop
- An excerpt from a French criminal hearing
Thank you to @pep.ito.75 for co-hosting this edition and to @lacaserneparis for hosting us.
Link in bio to sign up for the newsletter and stay up-to-date on future editions.
Saturday, January 31, 2026 at @ecolejeanninemanuel
Le MEETUP 8 (WHO EVEN ARE YOU?) traced adolescence as a structure that lingers, shaping how we desire, perform, attach, and misrecognize ourselves well into adulthood. We explored adolescence as a site of projection, discipline, fantasy, and control: something pathologized, romanticized, endlessly mined by culture, yet rarely listened to on its own terms. Through film, theory, and collective exchange, we asked what it means to grow up, and what never quite does.
Objects considered:
- Mean Girls (2004)
- Françoise Dolto’s Complexe du homard (2018)
- Thoughts and Prayers (2025) by Zackery Canepari and Jessica Dimmock
Thank you to @adadeschanel for co-hosting this edition with us.
Link in bio to sign up for the newsletter and stay up-to-date on future events!
#lemeetup #parisevents #teenage #meangirls #adolescence
🎉Join us on Friday, December 19!
An informal evening to celebrate the year and everything we’ve accomplished as a group and as an organization.
Whether you’ve joined us at one of our events before or have been meaning to come, we’d love to meet you. RSVP link in bio.
Where? @lagencebar
What time? From 19h30
Come as you are. Drinks available for purchase at the bar.
Friday, November 21, 2025 at Michael’s apartment.
Le MEETUP 7 (Are we safe here?) explored how safe spaces come into being, what it takes to sustain them, how labor circulates within them, and how their structures shape and redistribute affect.
We turned to outdoor spaces, online communities, and spaces born from identitarian projects to understand what safety makes possible, and for whom.
Objects considered:
- Scarves over headscarves by Giovanna dell’Orto for @apnews
- Beyond the Talk: Deja Foxx on finding alternative online spaces for @ted
- Sur la non-mixité FLINTA by @frictionmagazinefr
Thank you to all the participants, familiar and new faces, for an evening of honest exchange on topics that aren’t so easy to deconstruct.
#lemeetup #parisevent #safespace
ARE WE SAFE HERE?
Safety isn’t given. It’s made. It’s born from refusal: shelters against violence, riots against injustice, sanctuaries against persecution.
To call a space “safe” is never neutral. It draws lines: who is seen, who enters, on what terms. Safety lives in infrastructure, language, and culture. Each leaves its mark on the body it claims to protect.
Safety is also bodily. The click of a lock, the dimming of a light, the spacing of chairs. Comfort, safety, and freedom don’t always align. For some, safety can even feel strange.
Boundaries protect, but they can also police. Still, some harms require distance, pause, or space.
Le MEETUP 7 turns toward these tensions. What does it mean to call a space “safe” today? Who makes that claim? And who pays its cost?
Friday, November 21, 2025. RSVP link in bio.
#lemeetup #paris #safespace
Friday, September 12, 2025 at L’Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière.
MEETUP 6 explored what it means to “be well.” To say, “I’m fine,” when you’re not. To ask “are you ok?” knowing there’s no simple answer. Together, we redefined health in our own words, compared it to the WHO’s definition, and tried inhabiting both sides of care: doctor, patient, observer. Inside the Pitié-Salpêtrière, vulnerability became a structure. We practiced intimacy: being listened to, being seen, exposing ourselves without knowing how we’d be received. In that choreography, trust began to circulate. For a night, the group became something like a support system.
Objects considered:
- Orlando, ma biographie politique by @officialpaulbpreciado
- Les Cent Ans de Frantz Fanon, France Culture
- Passport Photos by @maxsiedentopf
Special thanks to @y.tmz for co-hosting and @arthit_lorenzo for the photos.
Friday, April 11, 2025 at @thewindowparis
MEETUP 5 asked what’s left of intimacy when dating becomes performance—an endless stream of profiles, gestures, and curated selves. We offered something else: no names, no filters, no algorithm. Just a room, a pause, and the discomfort of not knowing. Together, we sat with identity unspoken, memory unstructured, desire without direction. In a world obsessed with clarity and control, we chose opacity. Not to escape, but to make space for the unknown to speak.
Objects considered:
- Le fragment d’un discours amoureux by Roland Barthes
- L’utopie du corps by Michel Foucault
- Les petites annonces de Vidéomaton
- Chérie, je t’aime from Libération
Thank you to all the participants, to @alaisdiop for co-hosting, to @thewindowparis and @lesyeuxlabouche for having us, and to @lenaelmone for feeding us.
#lemeetup #art #events #dating #love
Friday, January 31, 2025 at @tesson_project_space
The extraordinary has lost its edge. Once, it was the thing that ruptured the ordinary, the event that demanded pause. Now, it’s the air we breathe, the climate that burns, the unraveling of structure we were taught to believe in. If the extraordinary was meant to shock, what happens when we no longer flinch?
At MEETUP 4, we considered what stories remain when the script of stability falters. The human aversion to nature—our fear of it, our fantasy of control—collides with our absolute dependence on it. Trust, so often framed as a virtue, became something else: a practice, maybe even a compulsion. And betrayal—what if betrayal is not failure, but an exercise?
To narrate instability is to resist resolution. To tell a story about chaos is to acknowledge that it cannot be contained. Perhaps this is where we find ourselves now—not at the threshold of the extraordinary, but inside it.
Objects considered
- Melancholia by @larsvontrier_
- The Weather Project by @studioolafureliasson
- Brides on Tour by Pippa Bacca as explored by @bianchicarolina
- The Great Derangement by @amitav_ghosh1
Thank you to all the participants, to the new faces, to @marguerite.du.trash for co-hosting, to @tesson_project_space for making space, and to @gchemery for the images.
#lemeetup #events #art #climatecrisis #narrative #writing #criticalthinking
Sunday, November 24, 2024 at @comptoirclub.paris
MEETUP 3 began with Palestine—a site where nearly a century of settler colonialism has inscribed trauma across generations. We traced the ways power manipulates narratives of suffering, weaponizing trauma to justify violence, control memory, and normalize the unthinkable. Genocide demands we confront not only its brutal realities but also the ideological machinery that sustains it—genocide framed as defense, dehumanization as necessity, erasure as progress.
Yet we also sought what resists. How do we imagine repair in a world so marked by suffering? Through memory, art, poetry, and humor, we explored the fragile yet enduring forces of resilience and solidarity. These acts defy the fractures of violence, refusing erasure, insisting on liberation. In them, we glimpsed the possibility of a different story—one where the weight of history does not crush, but transforms.
Objects considered:
- Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
- Orientalism by Edward Said
- How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war by Naomi Klein
- Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide by Fargo Tbakhi
Thank you to all the participants and all the new faces, to @rush_u90 for organizing, and to @comptoirclub.paris for the space. 💫
#paris #event #culture #naomiklein #freepalestine #meetup
As the MEETUP series continues to grow, we’re excited to announce the release of our very first zine, launched in celebration of 𝑀𝐸𝐸𝑇𝑈𝑃 3 (𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑟𝑖𝑝 𝑜𝑓 𝑃𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟: 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑟𝑦 𝐷𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝𝑠, 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑢𝑚𝑎, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑎𝑡ℎ 𝑡𝑜 𝐻𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔), co-organized with the brilliant Rachad Nasr. We can’t wait to see you this Sunday, November 24, 2024—and yes, all attendees will get a copy! See you there 💫
