The articles composing this week's issue are contemplations on the present continuous nature of creative endeavours—the enlightening, puzzling, even agonising processes that lead us, as creatives and as audiences, to creativity, to learn or de-condition, continuing into the future with the saplings of the present.

Our exclusive interview with Beirut-based architect Bernard Khoury confirms Lebanon's contextual and political architectures, and how he's “an architect of the present". In our book review of 'Christian Moeller: Open Encounters', art writer Jan Tumlir highlights the ever-present risk of overlooking public art; he believes that the German artist spent his career balancing his work's visibility to stand out and fit in, pre-empting as he created, how it would be received later.

In a suburb lacking adequate infrastructure, the Rising Star School buildings in Zimbabwe designed by Engineers Without Borders Germany overcome resource scarcity with ingenuity, enabling hope for Hopley, brick-by-brick. Nikhil Chopra, the curator for the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale with HH Art Spaces, aspires to foster moments of gathering—as contemporaries, people and co-habitants—in the presence of visitors and storytellers from distant lands.

These stories peek into the possibilities of creative intent—to learn from legacies and build from collective learnings, from context and tribulations, and the fragility of current frames that erect and crumble at the same time—akin to how we function in present continuous cycles.