Germany has voted. Yet fundamental questions remain open.

Artist and activist Ina-Maria Shikongo talks about the fight for justice and for survival in her native Namibia.

Igor Levit is a pianist who connects his art with the social events happening around him.

I was actually in Wuhan in November of 2019 to visit a collector and came back with pneumonia. And already in December some people were talking to me about a strange virus in Wuhan.

I don't think Covid revealed anything we did not already know about capitalism – a system that makes certain priorities, and those priorities are based mostly on ideals of profitability and cutting costs.

It is a relationship on quite a few different levels. The coronavirus, SARS-Cov-2, is just one of many instances in recent years of emerging infectious diseases that leap over into humanity from the animal kingdoms.

It is important to understand that this is our second confrontation with this kind of virus. The first time was SARS in 2003, and we just panicked. The central government said different things from the municipal governments, locking down an entire hospital unannounced, all in all 73 people died.

It will be a very mixed verdict – but democracy might not be the deciding factor on how to solve the problem of the pandemic. We see democracies performing very differently. So far, we don't really have an explanation for that.

We are all vulnerable and we all have a common destiny. A lot of people have come to realize that they cannot master everything and that the connection with humans is the most important thing.

It turned out to be one of the most memorable summer vacations in my lifetime — I found myself lying on a sunny, picturesque beach in the South of France; being swept away, much like with waves, by the wafting scents of Provençal seaside cuisine; and surrounding myself with three happy children building sea castles in the warm sand.

This crisis has been the biggest real time simultaneous challenge to governance and policy that anyone can remember. It has had extremely uneven responses all over the world, the successes and the failures of which are complicated.

I came to Hong Kong early this year when there was suddenly this outbreak. I have been stuck here since then.

I think the pandemic will be seen as having accelerated a process that was already deeply advanced – the decline of Western ideological and intellectual hegemony. The material decline started a long time ago, but the hegemony was still intact through the years of decline.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on the vulnerability of our very existence, and heavily disturbs daily routines that hitherto have been taken for granted. Unpreparedness and uncertainty prevail among experts as well as political leaders.