In an age which has been called the ‘empire of the ephemeral’, ephemeral urbanism is today a necessity, a choice and a symptom, calling into question our habitual conceptions of urbanism and revealing resistance, rituals, disasters, dramas and divergence. Felipe Vera, a Chilean architect and curator, a specialist in themes relating to temporary cities, who, with the Indian architect Rahul Mehrotra, took part in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, talks to us about the other vision of these cities that flow like Heraclitus’ river of time.

In this written interview, Éric Marty addresses some of the compulsory stopping points in his book, Le sexe des Modernes: the consequences of the sex/gender binomial, the ‘trans’ as the figure that disrupts gender theory and the critical dialogue with Judith Butler.

In this review, Afonso Dias Ramos reads four books that reflect on the Covid-19 pandemic and how the world has changed and will continue to do so. He stresses that the books, written by four Portuguese authors with different backgrounds and views, show ‘a rare critical willingness to confront a contemporary event’ and underlines that the current context requires ‘a different kind of writing’.

These days, people everywhere are calling for a type of politics that places ethical requirements at its centre. It is time to question this stitching together of ethics and politics and the misunderstandings and consequences of this claim for the concept of politics. The response to this challenge comes, on the one hand, from Donatella Di Cesare, an Italian philosopher well-known for her books on Heidegger and the Jews (from the German philosopher’s Black Notebooks) and on the ‘philosophy of migration’, and, on the other, from Bruno Peixe Dias, a doctoral student in the area of political philosophy.

The writer recounts the experience of youth in a place that, in his view, is ‘Lisbon’s last suburb’. It is told in the first person and filtered through eyes that have meanwhile acquired the language and analytical tools needed to understand the hatred and cruel laws of a world – ours – full of borders and demarcated territories. It is of paradigmatic value here.
 

Grotesque power, one of the long-standing declensions of political power, has triumphantly re-emerged in our time in the form of figures who act like buffoons, clowns and jesters. This is what writer and journalist Christian Salmon, contributor to some of the most prestigious international newspapers and author of a vast and original body of work on our contemporaneity, discusses in this essay.

Giancarlo Giannini's gigantic eyes in Pasqualino Settebellezze, the faces and wigs taking up the entire screen in Lina Wertmüller's Love and Anarchy. A mannerist palette. The light of the butcher's shop and the humanoids of The Brood, plus the bulbs that are pouches that are placentas in her body. They all form characters, or rather entities, situated in the threshold no longer human nor natural, but rather natura desnaturata, taken as the sprout of it all. Finally, and always in between, the inverted Disney hands or Mickey Mouse gloves, falling. They are brushes and mops since intelligence and sweeping intersect, according to Simone Weil’s clairvoyance. Manet and his warm and cold neutrals mastering asparagus and all the stillleben ad oleo it contains. Asparagus in nuptials with the milky white surface, already lying down, like a brush at the end of the day, put to rest. Following Rosalba Carriera's example, perhaps awkwardly but fine, I went for the pastels, which is the same as joy in Gravity&Grace. Everything is dust, as Li Po used to say.

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture, an agency that uses architecture as material evidence, leading independent investigations and partnering with international prosecutors and environmental and human rights groups to find, reconstruct, and expose violence. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Weizman discusses a decade of working across the boundaries between art and forensic analysis, journalism and the law, with advanced spatial and media investigations into key cases of state and corporate violence around the world.

In today’s all-pervasive communications society, with its arsenal of technological tools, fame is a conspicuous object of desire, an aspiration that requires no exceptional acts or achievements because universal recognition has become an end in itself. Famous people, celebrities and stars form a vast constellation of people who achieve fame – real social actors who sweep into our world before vanishing as quickly as they appeared. The rules and factors governing fame and celebrity throughout history have been determined by the structure of the public space and by the codes and techniques of socialisation. Thus TV, with all its power to create and disseminate images, initiated a new era in the history of fame that is still ongoing, despite strong competition from the Internet and social media that have introduced new rules into the way the frequency of dissemination constructs fame. Prestige, recognition and authority – factors that once shared a common space with fame – are no longer so relevant, being subject to forms of legitimation that have lost much of their importance.

Formulating the law that determines the fame of ‘stars’ in the society of the spectacle, the Italian philosopher Mario Pezzella discusses the seductive staging and affirmative form of appearance that is distinctive to them and which produces a system of desire and a compelling form of voluntary bondage, while at the same time reactivating mythical archetypes.