Montreal’s new underground social scene is all about dinners, drawing, and apartment galleries

It is rare to encounter the unknown in your own home. Our domestic spaces are cocoons of familiarity, containers that hold us against stable backdrops, so we can rest and repeat. 

I noticed something electric had entered my home the moment I seated six strangers in my dining room. Each placed an object at the centre of the marble table: an hourglass counting down time with yellow sand, a ceramic replica of a girl with rosy cheeks, a small wooden shoe with a secret compartment. They’d come over to craft personal stories about these objects, and to read these texts out loud at the end of the soirée.