The dossier of this edition of Electra speaks of our age by speaking of food. Food is a global feature of our times, ever present as we strive for goals that always seem out of reach. Food seduces and bewitches, rallies and mobilises, fascinates and even sparks obsession. And, in some parts of the world, it is often in short supply. (...)

There are countless discourses today about food and everything that revolves around it. A quintessential anthropological object enshrined in the expression ‘we are what we eat’, food has become a matter of great cultural and social importance that is studied at the highest level and given prominence in the media and publishing industry.

The ‘Metropolitan’ section of this issue focuses on the relationship between hospitals and the city. Daniela Arnaut, an architect, university professor and researcher of ‘healthcare buildings’ and ‘healing spaces’, reveals a history that is often invisible because it is right in front of our eyes. As the pandemic rages, this essay encourages us to reflect on issues such as environmental hygiene, and asks whether we are witnessing a re-ordering of the urban space.

On the centenary of Clarice Lispector’s birth, Ricardo Domeneck, a Brazilian poet, visual artist and critic based in Berlin, revisits this great Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer and analyses the period in which she lived and how this is reflected in her timeless work. Surprisingly, Domeneck refers to Lispector as ‘political’, in the atypical sense of the word: that which is prior to and predates ‘the city of men’. Her work opens onto other worlds, and its words have a new resonance that brings a seemingly novel beauty to her melancholic and elegant photographs.

Goddess of goddesses, sphinx of sphinxes, mystery of mysteries, Madame Grès shone brightly in the exclusive world of Parisian haute couture. Her legacy was her ceaseless quest for absolute beauty in her designs. Her long, draped dresses crafted with obsession and technical mastery are a profound reflection on fashion, time and memory. Anabela Becho, a fashion curator and researcher, describes the life and work of this great couturière.

Henning Lundkvist is a Swedish visual artist and writer who lives in the capital of Denmark. Taking Kharabat, ‘the last teahouse of its kind’, as his cue, the author draws an unexpected parallel between two very distant and very different cities: Copenhagen and Kabul. We are suddenly immersed in a world of sounds (including music), tastes, images and technologies in which a synaesthetic interweaving of times and spaces inspires us to travel, imagine and wander. This View of Delft thus becomes a moving painting in which the forms, figures and colours are haunted by the subterranean threat of the sea.

In this interview on his work and life, Adam Phillips talks about psychoanalysis, literature and the relationship between the two – both in terms of his personal activity and what it is that comprises them as fields of human understanding and intervention. Phillips is a psychoanalyst, literary critic and essayist with a vast and diverse oeuvre that has been translated into many languages. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Observer and The New York Times and is currently coordinating the new Penguin complete works of Freud. In this quick-moving conversation with the interviewer Afonso Dias Ramos, the British academic talks about the world today, the changes that have occurred and those that may yet take place. He suggests that we should be attempting to have more open and flexible conversations.

"It was my turn to repaint a new image of some of the masterpieces of the Prado Museum through photography. As I have been using the technique of double or multiple exposures on analogue film for years, I considered it a fitting formula to build my imagery." In his descriptive memoire written for Electra about this work, the renowned photographer Alberto García-Alix, a Spanish National Photography Award winner, tells us about his relationship with the Prado, which began as a child when he was taken there by his mother, and talks about the method he used to create photographs based on the Museum’s artworks. Some of these previously unseen photographs are presented in the ‘Scoop’ section of this issue. They show how images can give continuity to other images in a way that veils them as much as it reveals them, in a journey to a world which is recognisable one moment and unrecognisable the next.

Nathalie Quintane and Olivia Rosenthal are both leading lights of the French literary and artistic scenes. Both were asked to interpret or comment on a phrase by Virginia Woolf that establishes a relationship between the female condition and access to the writing ‘profession’ in tangible terms. The resulting essays affirm Woolf’s relevance in the world we live in today.

* A paper delivered by Virginia Woolf to the Women's Service League, 1932

In this review, Afonso Dias Ramos reads four books that reflect on the Covid-19 pandemic and how the world has changed and will continue to do so. He stresses that the books, written by four Portuguese authors with different backgrounds and views, show ‘a rare critical willingness to confront a contemporary event’ and underlines that the current context requires ‘a different kind of writing’.

Once in circulation, there are certain words can seem strange to anyone who is literate. Some come to stay and settle. Others flit about but never roost, and sooner or later take flight and are gone. When it comes to words borrowed from other languages, there are those that invoke the mysterious nemesis we call ‘the nature of the language’ – its identity. Perhaps the best approach is to be practical. Such words can come in handy; that is all. It is even possible that the ‘nature of the language’ may have something to do with it.