As a kid with a penchant for playing house, I was always concerned by the ideal setup for community living. After much thought, around the age of eight, I decided that acquiring a barren piece of desert and erecting a flower-shaped cul-de-sac, with each petal boasting one house, would be most sensible for my purposes. Hastily, I drew up a plan.
I was enchanted by the American suburban promise of safety in seclusion, a concept graciously fed to me in the form of Bil Keane’s Family Circus comics. Drawn within a circle rather than the common square, an irresistible snugness contained each faithful ode to the nuclear family. A simple existence in a utopically peaceful neighbourhood, recurring every day for the comic’s six-decade history? I was sold.
Growing out of that sentimental illusion swung me dramatically in the opposite direction. My need for environmental novelty brought me to Montreal, and once I got used to life here, I moved on to Paris. In standard twenty-year-old style, my ultimate aim was to shoulder off any anchors and escape the confines of convention. However, after returning from my semester abroad, my appreciation for the community here blossomed, and I accidentally began to feel rooted.
I was then faced with the challenge of nurturing stability and a sense of being home while fending off the reverence for tradition that often underpins these sentiments. How do you establish a sense of permanence in a place when there is no promise that you, or your peers, will continue living there in a few years’ time? I brought the question to some articulate young folks with exceptional home-making faculties.
Aleksi Kemppi
Natalia Kolesnikow & Eva Lynch
Aleksi Kemppi
These poetic remarks awakened me to the centrality of kinesthesia to the matter. Following the counsel of these experts, I turned my attention to how the desire to stay put manifests physically, and ventured to build a space that nurtures that feeling.
A truly comforting space arrests the body, holding it in relief and allowing a heavy serenity, even sleepiness, to wash over it. Uncomfortable spaces can be arresting in the opposite way—the sterile white lighting and cramped plastic seating found in most lecture halls survey, rather than envelop, their students.
ENGL 472–Feminist Cultural Studies: Video and Performance, taught by Professor Celia Vara, was a research-creation cultural studies seminar that attended to the body in a way that I had not yet encountered at McGill. The environment reflected each student’s personality, and such tailoring required an overhaul of the classroom’s defining features. Often, the overhead lights were replaced by a coloured lamp, tables and chairs were displaced to serve the activity of the day, and soft drapes and blankets were brought in for physical ease. Music played as we worked.
For Jocelyn Wong, a classmate and recent research-creation convert, spending a semester in this space altered her perspective on knowledge.
“The research-creation method reframed my conception of learning from focusing on the result to being process-oriented,” Wong explained. “The environment for each of the group projects was curated to provoke specific feelings which would create each of the moods that were intended.”
This mutable, emoting, and nourishing environment recalled the classrooms of my early childhood, where learning and playing were seen as one and the same. I came to understand that most successful learning spaces treat the classroom as a type of home.
A desire to reintroduce this wide-eyed warmth became the catalyst for my current fixation: Circle Time. An unruly spin on the joyful aspects of the classroom, Circle Time is a series of gatherings, primarily chez moi, which seek to nurture the kinds of knowledge that flow out of feeling safe and united with one’s peers. At Circle Time, we provide our attendees with gentle, undemanding stimuli—themed music and visuals, small and optional activities, and a lot of free space to gather and get comfy.
I spoke to Anna Chudakov, my Circle Time co-conspirator, roommate, and Multimedia Editor at The Tribune, about the impetus for this style of event. “As someone who was raised with the Montessori method, the tactile element of learning was really formative, and every time I am in a typical classroom, I feel a burning lack. Every time I am forced to raise my hand instead of placing it on my teacher’s shoulder, a small part of me withers, and I am left to pine for more,” Chudakov generously shared. “Circle Time revolves around a return to playfulness, and cultivating a space of safety and curiosity where the participants can bring in an element of themselves.”
At Circle Time, the limiting social codes typical to a party scene are nowhere to be found. Chudakov explains: “We pay a significant amount of attention to the space in which our events take place, out of the belief that in a comfortable space, people take on a more open and inquisitive attitude.”
Opportunity to lay down and go silent abounds. In this regard, we draw inspiration from the 1990s vision of a Chillout room. Providing dancers with a beanbag-padded, ambient musical haven, the chillout room was a feature of early rave spaces which the party cultures of today have largely abandoned.
There are, however, event organizers in Montreal who keep this fantasy alive in innovative ways. Sako Ghanaghounian, man-about-town and ambient sleepover specialist, is one of them. The first edition of S0undbath (now zzzzzz.club ) transformed a loft space into a cloud-filled, downtempo dream world, made for drifting in and out of sleep.
“The ambient events I’ve hosted in the past, particularly the sleepovers, draw heavy influence from chillout rooms that many raves would have in the ’90s and ’00s,” Ghanaghounian explained. “Unfortunately, parties in Montreal don’t normally feature side rooms where people are given the opportunity to collectively rest, immerse, and bliss out in such a way due to the limited amount of spaces and resources in this city–so why not just make it an event of its own?”
Soundbath
Creative ideas always seem to flow in these states of half-consciousness, when the body is totally relaxed and the mind has long wandered off into a cloudy landscape. Making room for drowsiness is as crucial for innovation and exploration as it is for leisure—and this can be induced by the qualities of a space. Circle Time attendee and seasoned chiller Vivian Miyata noted, “I think it was the blue lighting that really did it for me. I felt like I was underwater, it felt like I could fall asleep at any moment […] it was lovely and beautiful.” For Ghanaghounian, the comfort of an event depends on having “ample room to move about without disturbing those around you, an abundance of spaces to rest so that you can endure the night, and very careful attention to the way the room sounds, with low amounts of lighting.”
Under the purview of Tourisme Montréal, access to this kind of awe and escape has become framed as a purchasable “immersive experience”—but collective rest and sensory nurturing don’t need to be mediated by a museum exhibit. The marketization of “chill out” products can lead us astray from the truly healthful pleasures of a comforting collective existence. By the late 1990s, music associated with the chillout room scene was co-opted by television programs and commercials which sold relaxation as a quick fix, fitting into a stressful schedule. Now, as the once-radical concept of self-care is increasingly linked to individualism and indulgence, we need to look for comfort elsewhere.
As student-residents of Montreal, we can find ourselves at home by separating tranquility from removal, stagnation, and consumption. Crafting temporary “chillout” spaces for shared comfort provides a way to engage with homemaking and community-building that accommodates change and retains a forward-looking creativity. Contrary to expectation, you don’t need to invent your own suburb to build space for a peaceful togetherness—though I’m still not opposed to employing the flower as a template where possible. Wherever we are, we deepen our connection to place and with each other by gathering around—and learning from—rest.