At the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, curated by Helena de Freitas, a new exhibition places the work of Rui Chafes and Alberto Giacometti side by side and head to head. The magnetic force of attraction between the two bodies of work is clear to the viewer, in what brings them together and what keeps them apart. Nicolao Federico, writer, philosopher and curator, is familiar with the work of both Giacometti and Chafes and writes about the artists and the exhibition in which they come together.

At the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, curated by Helena de Freitas, a new exhibition places the work of Rui Chafes and Alberto Giacometti side by side and head to head. The magnetic force of attraction between the two bodies of work is clear to the viewer, in what brings them together and what keeps them apart. Nicolao Federico, writer, philosopher and curator, is familiar with the work of both Giacometti and Chafes and writes about the artists and the exhibition in which they come together.

There is no transparency without light and the association of light with knowledge exists from time immemorial. As the quintessential transparent solid, glass too is connected with knowledge. Galileo polished lenses to study the stars, as did Leeuwenhoek to show us the microscopic world. Spinoza himself was a lens maker, a fact always stressed in his biographies, though we do not know for sure how metaphysics behaves when it hits glass. Nonetheless, we should not forget that the transparent object does not always preserve the image that traverses it. Look no further than Newton’s prism, which decomposes white light into the colours of the rainbow, or the ‘diaphanous mantle of fantasy’ used by Eça to cover ‘truth’s harsh nakedness’.

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.

As we look at time in an endeavour to understand it, we also need to listen to it. The voices, screams, murmurs, words, phraseology and silences of each span of time tell us what time it is.

The commonplaces and fixed ideas in the words spoken and voices heard are highly revealing, symptomatic and informative. They are a guiding line of shadow in a maze of light. It was not by chance that Gustave Flaubert regarded them with tireless diligence. His Dictionnaire des idées reçues was a manual of ethology

In art, architecture, design, science and technology, the 20th century was one of change, revolution and breaking with the past. It was a century of artistic movements, new doctrines, daring projects, radical experiences and cultural adventures. Coming in the wake of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts and founded by Walter Gropius a hundred years ago, Staatliches Bauhaus was fundamental to some of these changes. The people who worked with this school of architecture and design included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It had to move twice to different cities and lived under constant threat. It was closed by the Nazis in 1933, but everything it did in those few years lived on into the future. There is a before Bauhaus and an after Bauhaus. In this ‘Record’, the architect Ulf Meyer, author of Bauhaus: 1919-1933, tells the story of the school’s history and its presence in our world today.

Down the ages, human animals have looked to other animals to confirm their own superiority or inferiority, to vindicate or vilify themselves, and to establish their own identity and otherness, by examining what sets them apart and what they have in common. Humans have either exalted or condemned animals, casting them as gods or demons, sovereigns or slaves, tormentors or victims, free or captive, living beings with their own dignity or merely disposable objects.

One of the most awaited returns in recent years seems to be that of ethics to politics, accompanied by the realisation that it has been missing for quite a long time. This awaiting and realisation can be found in forces and agents that are normally considered opposites. If we look at one of the largest oppositions today, we find that both the defenders of democratic liberalism and what are generally called populist movements set great store by ethics.

What relationship can there be between ethics and politics in the era that has seen the global triumph of the market and the effusions of the worldwide web, along with ecological collapse and the hyperbolic dream of the post-human? With the catastrophe created by the collision between the techno-economy and the biosphere already starting to unfold, the form of existence that survives in an immunised and closed world, with nothing outside, turns inward, prey to an overwhelming fear of anything external, dominated by an unprecedented exophobia, and unable to see beyond itself. These days it is easier to imagine becoming immortal than to envisage the end of capitalism.

‘Time is money’: no one has better expressed the absolute power of this earthly deity that governs even the categories of our experience than Benjamin Franklin, in the opening words of his Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748), cited prominently by Max Weber, who explores the idea in the second chapter of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.