The French philosopher and author of Biopolitique des catastrophes, Frédéric Neyrat, carries out a critical analysis of the present, identifying its ‘kinetic dilemma’, a hesitation between two movements, one too fast and the other too slow, that are responsible for the ecological disaster. Discontinuation, he argues, is the sole ‘kinetic therapy’ that can respond to the immense problems confronting us today.

Yves Citton is the co-director of the journal Multitudes. His point of departure is the distinction between speed and acceleration, in line with Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s #Accelerate: Manifesto, which he translated into French. He sees in collapse, and in the perennial crises in which we live, the only chance of a desirable change. From this point of view, the only suitable strategy for our times consists of accelerating the collapse.

Laurent de Sutter is professor of legal theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and managing editor of the series Perspectives Critiques (PUF – Presses universitaires de France). Here he develops a hypothesis that, under certain conditions, accepts accelerationism – i.e. the perspective that advocates reformulating and not sabotaging or damping down the means and the infrastructure that we have inherited from modernity.

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.

In the view of Italian philosopher Federico Leoni, the novel coronavirus cannot be regarded simply from the perspective of its very obvious effects of deceleration and shut-down, as, on the contrary, it has also been a factor of acceleration for certain ongoing movements that relate specifically to our times.

This work corresponds to the last eleven days of the (official) lockdown. It is part of a larger undertaking entitled Os dias estão numerados/The Days are Numbered, covering the period from 24 April to 4 May 2020.

This is the portrait of a great twentieth-century political leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who played a decisive role in the implosion of the East European communist regimes, with consequences that Europe and the world know well. The picture that William Taubman draws here combines his political career with the history of a personal life that makes him a distinctive personality.

A painter comments on the words of another painter. At the end of his life, no longer able to paint, Paul Gauguin devoted himself to writing as a means of providing an intimate and autobiographical perspective in his search for self-knowledge and his desire to question a complex identity. From this exercise, to which he dedicated himself tardily but intensely, emerged a sentence that offers a disenchanted assessment of life. The painter João Queiroz discusses it here.

Our cities are increasingly acoustic cities. The most immense or most intimate public spaces are stages on which sound is one of the actors. John Bingham-Hall is the director of Theatrum Mundi, which was founded by the great sociologist and urbanist Richard Sennett. He works with Gascia Ouzounian, co-director of Recomposing the City, on the Acoustic Cities project. In this Metropolitan section, they talk about their work and the basic topics of sonic urbanism, including sonic citizenship, sonic archaeology and ‘sonic justice as a right to access to quiet or indeed to make noise’. A new way of hearing the city that underlies a new way of seeing the city.

Stefan Kürten is a well-reputed German artist whose work has been shown in art galleries and institutions in Europe and the USA. He was professor for painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently guest professor at the School of Art and Design, Alfred University, New York. In this portfolio, especially created for Electra, he develops some of the themes and motifs most represented in his work. The respected curator and critic Gregor Jansen, director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, wrote the following essay expressly to accompany this artwork. He speaks of the inspiration that Kürten’s work finds in cinema, of the strange relationship between architecture, innocence and terror – and, also, of the images, and the stories that we derive from them.