In 2023, three exhibitions by Rui Chafes were held in Lisbon and Porto. With a career spanning four decades and a body of work that uses sculpture, drawing and text as its mediums, he is a key figure in contemporary art in Portugal and one of those who has achieved the greatest international projection. In this section, the artist, essayist and university professor João Sousa Cardoso talks about this oeuvre, revisiting the three exhibitions and leaving a future memory of them.

Italian writer Salvatore Settis is an art historian known for his public intervention and essays on the threats raised by political and economic management to cultural heritage. This is one of the topics approached in this interview, which also deals with the pressure that historical cities are subjected by tourists, as well as the role and responsibility of architects.

Bernardo Carvalho, a writer from Rio de Janeiro, ventures into the city of São Paulo and studies its less obvious side. Sometimes, he examines it through the strong lenses of a Lévi-Strauss; at others he sketches a psychological portrait of it on the basis of certain symptoms.

Not so long ago we rarely encountered the verb ‘scrutinise’. And not even a glimpse of it in literary texts. We cannot pronounce or write such a word without crashing against its materiality, without feeling the friction and sound of its consonants.

Jason Read, a Spinozian and professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine (USA), writes a blog (Unemployed Negativity) in which he analyses how work is depicted in films and books. In this article, the subject of analysis is the famous TV series Breaking Bad, in which the plot, focused on the character of the chemistry teacher-turned-drug lord Walter White, emphasises the role of work as a central issue.

A city is also made of the intentions, desires, gestures and acts that fill it with other movement and cover it with different rhythms. To observe it in its streets and obstacles, to unveil it where it opens and closes up, to act performatively on the city is, at the same time, to confirm and transform it, to traverse and probe it, to surpass and transcend it, to preserve and disturb it. It is to impart an instability to its stability, an ephemerality to its continuity, a departure to its permanence, a metamorphosis to its form. Performance art is a praxis: we transform ourselves by transforming, we become what we are and what we are not. This is what preoccupies Ana Pais, a theatre critic, professor and researcher, and the editor of Performance in the Public Sphere.

Taking on the labyrinth, the literary critic and art history researcher, João Oliveira Duarte, writes on the vast volume that brings together all the critical work of Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, to which the poet gave a simple descriptive title Poesia Portuguesa Contemporânea [Contemporary Portuguese Poetry].

The increasingly volatile nature of the value of money and of money itself, which requires stability above all else, means we are just waiting for the next financial collapse. The philosopher Yves Citton uses this statement to expand on seven ‘lessons’ that need to be taken from this situation, which gives rise to a kind of ‘collapsology’. These seven ‘stories’ or ‘lessons’ are untimely considerations for economic theories.

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.

‘If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’ Bernard Baruch once said. ‘If all you have is a phone with an internet connection, everything looks like a web,’ we could say in an echo, in a chorus (or through loudspeakers). From the small light of a multicoloured screen, the world is becoming increasingly similar, not like a supermarket shelf from which we select objects for purchasing, but like a rhizome of data and relationships that we can access, almost instantly, with a click.