‘Because there is a hidden story on every corner in Paris’. Thus ends this evocation of a city which, like no other, is built on space-time. In his article, the musician and writer Adolfo Luxúria Canibal mixes his own memories with more general ones. While his impressions do not ignore those of others, his personal experience of living in the city for five years lends them an authenticity. The vocalist of the band Mão Morta reminisces about this ‘cosmopolitan and parochial’ city, where living is an art form and reality is never disentangled from the imaginary, and the figure of Isidore Ducasse, the Count of Lautréamot, lurks like a luminescent shadow.

The French historian Patrick Rambourg, author of Histoire de la cuisine et de la gastronomie françaises (2010), describes the creation of the restaurant in the 18th century and its evolution. This Parisian institution, which has been exported all around the world, is suffused with the gastronomic mystique of Paris and constitutes a place of refined social interaction and conviviality.

In the year when we celebrate the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth, Carla Benedetti, Bruno Moroncini and Vinícius Nicastro Honesko – authors of essays and studies on the filmmaker, writer, essayist and intellectual – evoke this leading figure of 20th century Italy, highlighting his relevance today.

Pasolini had a difficult theoretical and political intellectual relationship with the students that were involved in riots and uprisings in 1968. Here, Vinícius Nicastro Honesko, a lecturer at Universidade Federal do Paraná and author of Pier Paolo Pasolini: Estudos Sobre a Figura do Intelectual, writes about the effects on Pasolini’s thinking of the idea behind his redefinition of a student. This idea was that young people were now denied the opportunity of a ‘revolutionary experience’.

The philosopher and cultural historian Thomas Macho – a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin and director of a research centre on cultural sciences at the University of Linz in Austria – examines an issue that runs through Pasolini’s cinematic oeuvre: the relationship between the criticism of power and the metabolic logic of consumer society, with its representations of food and hunger.

Here, Cristina Fernandes interprets and comments on one of the thoughts that Paul Valéry turned into an aphorism. In her writing (which we can read in the ‘Bicho Ruim’ blog that she has with Rui Manuel Amaral and soon in a book entitled C de C) she also cultivates short prose.

With Les contes cruels de Paulo Rego, the great Portuguese painter is the first living artist to have a solo show at the Musée de L’Orangerie – a show widely reported in the press and praised by the critics. This is also the French public’s first big chance to get up close to a body of work they have no more than glimpsed in the past. João Pinharanda, an art historian and critic, explores the history (and the psychology) of France’s relationship with this oeuvre and its violence, seeking an answer to a puzzle that might only now be within our grasp. Deciphering this enigma is a crucial step towards discovering both the drive behind Rego’s work and the imprint of a culture.

Name: Paulo Nozolino. Profession: photographer. We can start with this simple bio. Guided by the interview below, we can then enter the ‘lab’ of this nomadic photographer, who crosses borders and is radically averse to serene places and their tranquil images.

By biographical circumstance, the writer and architectural historian Paulo Varela Gomes was an inhabitant and observer of the countryside and country living for over a decade. This experience offered him plenty of food for thought. For him, who had always been immersed in city issues and culture, it represented an important theoretical challenge, as you can gather in this passage from one of his texts where this question arises.

An exhibition by Pedro A.H. Paixão at Galeria 111 in Lisbon in the first half of 2020 is revisited here by the art critic José Marmeleira. In Aurora. Desenhos e Outros Materiais, this Milan-based artist creates work which is as consistent in its results as it is in the theoretical thought that underlies it, as it encounters the canonical genres of art history such as drawing and the portrait.