In this essay-feature, the musician, programmer and publisher Pedro Gomes talks to four artists associated with creole rap, who tell us stories from the neighbourhoods of the Greater Lisbon area and the South Bank. It also shows us the photos that the photographer Diogo Simões took for Electra. The encounter of words and pictures is accompanied by the rhythms of a music that has recently taken hold. This section also has the collaboration of Otávio Raposo with a brief history of Creole rap. ‘By registering their experiences living in marginalised territories and challenging the subordinate position occupied by the Afro-Portuguese in Portuguese society, these rappers forged a collective identity that served as a shelter in an environment marked by hostile conditions,’ we are told by the anthropologist.

‘By registering their experiences living in marginalised territories and challenging the subordinate position occupied by the Afro-Portuguese in Portuguese society, these rappers forged a collective identity that served as a shelter in an environment marked by hostile conditions,’ we are told by anthropologist Otávio Raposo in this brief history of Creole rap in Portugal. He refers to its artistic, cultural, political and social facets and the fact that this marginal, underground music has gained ground and popularity. ‘Neglected by record labels, radio and other hegemonic media, today Creole rap is one of the most vibrant music genres among Portuguese youth, mobilising artists and a legion of fans who use the new technologies of production and dissemination to acquire visibility’.

Biding our time means being able to extract from ourselves and the world the ideas, words and images that fix time in its defiant immutability and prolong its insolent mobility. This is why Parmenides, the master of being, and Heraclitus, the philosopher of the future, kept up a dialogue and a debate that Electra has been listening to attentively.

Traditional farming methods and the harmonious use of resources have been completely replaced in agriculture by techno-industrial mechanisms of intensive and accelerated production. Obedience to long timeframes, expansive space, and nature’s laws and caprices have become a luxury in today’s world. A minority obeys them still, and yet others uphold, without reservations, the benefits of an agricultural model that responds to the most modern criteria of speed and efficiency. In the interview below, three agricultural professionals offer their perspectives.

The 'cultural industry', as it was described by Adorno and Horkheimer, imposed a new relationship between culture and free time. Based on the analyses of the Frankfurt School, Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, professor at the Department of Communication and Social Psychology at the University of Alicante, author, among other books, of Mascaras de la mentira: el nuevo desorden de la posverdad [Masks of lies: the new post-truth disorder], writes about the regime of entertainment under the condition of digital culture.

In this dossier, we examine curiosity, in its scientific, literary and artistic forms. We also trace the key moments in its history: from being regarded in the Middle Ages as a vice and a transgression deserving of moral and religious punishment to being considered a valuable faculty in the modern age (or even, as Hobbes classified it, one of many passions) that lies at the root of the search for knowledge and the new scientific spirit. While this theme occupies no obvious place in our times – when learning and information are driven by mechanisms beyond the desire for knowledge that defines curiosity – it raises trans-historical issues about knowledge, morality and religion. In this context, it is apposite to recall that the etymology of the word ‘curiosity’ stems from the Latin curare, thus encompassing a semantic field that relates to the idea of caring. Here, then, we take a careful look at several questions which curiosity raises.

On 26 November 2011, at 15:02 (UTC), a space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. After a journey of 560 million kilometres, it arrived on Mars at 05:17 on 6 August 2012, its mission to explore the planet and carry out scientific research. The probe’s name was Curiosity.

Known above all for her important work on Leibniz and the Encyclopaedia, Olga Pombo, a professor at the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, writes on the debt science and knowledge as a whole owe to curiosity from the days of Aristotle.

‘With its grand title O Problema da Habitação [The Housing Problem], Daniel Malhão’s project is a set of images resulting from a process of permanent wandering through the city. In fact, through two cities: Lisbon and Vienna […] with no programme other than stopping for long enough to look at that which has no history, or at that which has not been captured by its history.’ The art critic and curator Delfim Sardo presents the collection of photographs that make up this ‘Metropolitan’ in an essay that is itself a wandering through the History of Photography that leads to the history of these photographs. Represented in important collections and with work shown in several national and international exhibitions, Daniel Malhão is a recognised contemporary Portuguese photographer, whose work has been marked by a close connection of photography with architecture.

On the seventh centenary of Dante’s death (1265-1321), Antonio Montefusco, professor in Medieval Latin Literature at the Universidade Ca’ Foscari de Veneza, discusses the poet of the Divine Comedy, who ‘invented the figure of the modern intellectual’ and introduced the ‘vernacular’ to poetry in the place of Latin. He looks critically at the ideological and political uses to which official commemorations of earlier centenaries have been subjected since the 19th century.