Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates. In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their  established boundaries.

The effects of May 1968 can be found in many current forms of struggle and revolt, where a new political awareness is being manifested — proof that the movement which erupted in Paris precisely 50 years ago had a highly mobilizing effect and cannot be reduced to a meaningless event: this is what American historian Kristin Ross shows us.

We look back at the 1920s from the 2020s and ask what happened then and what is happening now. Despite major changes, there are similarities that are not analogous but homologous (crises, pandemics, etc.). The American historian Bradley W. Hart, who received the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize in 2019, is a professor at California State University and an expert on this historical period, on which he has published several books. In this essay, he portrays an unstable, contradictory, perilous and fascinating decade when ‘there was no return to normality’ and anything seemed possible.

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.

Massimo Filippi, a professor of neurology in Milan, is a distinguished anti-speciesism scholar (see, among other work, Questioni di specie, 2017) and a relentless critic of the strict separation of humans and animals, which, according to him, produces and legitimises the ‘crimes’ perpetrated against animals. His article can be read and compared with the one that follows it, by Vasco M. Barreto.
 

The writer, psychoanalyst and curator Sinziana Ravini in this article describes and analyses an artistic attitude that found its perfect manifestation in the dandyism of the second half of the 19th century and then in the historical avant-gardes of the early 20th century. This attitude consisted in aestheticising life and making it a work of art, as did Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde to the highest degree.

In November 1966, Merce Cunningham’s dance company — and alongside the choreographer, his partner, the composer John Cage — came to Portugal for the first time. In those years, the country was ruled by an old dictatorship that left it culturally isolated and anachronistic, but there were people eager for openness and with the desire to disturb this stagnation. In this essay, the dancer, choreographer and editor João dos Santos Martins relates what happened in those surprising nights and how these novel shows were received. Art critics were divided between two opposite kinds of astonishment: one fuelled by incomprehension, the other by admiration. Artists such as Mário Cesariny and Ana Hatherly followed Cunningham and Cage, turning their presence into a manifesto. Among the Lisbon audience was the young Maria Filomena Molder, before she became a philosopher, who watched Cunningham’s choreography with the enthusiasm of someone witnessing a revelation. Alongside its historiographical value, this thorough research documents the awe produced by the unknown and shows how the artistic ruptures and revolutionary creations sent shock waves across the country. These inspired those who welcomed them with eager curiosity and exasperated those who were closed off in a self-sufficient attitude.

History is made up of what continues within us; it reminds us of what we did not live, or imagines what we have lived, which consequently becomes even more ours. The great historian Fernand Braudel, in one of his Écrits sur l’histoire, states that great political and social upheavals urge us to think or rethink the Universe.

In this ‘Book of Hours’, the renowned South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son speaks of the present and the past in a gesture that joins the world through the musicians that come together to perform. The pandemic traverses this diary as a reminder of the risk it presents to our lives. The concert that the artist cancelled at the last minute is a symbol of frustrated disappointment that she hopes to transform into the joy of hope – the hope that live music, currently silenced, will be heard again one day.

The Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare, author, among other works, of The Time of Revolt, travelled to Portugal in 1975 to witness the ongoing revolution that had had a major impact in Italy. Almost half a century later, she now gives her account of that ‘revolutionary holiday’.