You hear it and you immediately want to sing along. You want to sing even though you’re tone deaf and you’re not singing out loud: just silently and to yourself. The Catalogue Aria and the opera in which it features – Don Giovanni, with music by Mozart and libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte – are high points in the history of the musical theatre genre, which first appeared in Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Even in the present day there are numerous variations that surprise and delight.

The writer, journalist, and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach is one of the most intriguing characters of the first half of the 20th century – a period that witnessed both the best (in art for example) and worst (in politics) of things. She visited Lisbon twice, and she travelled widely in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Africa. Her works reflect the influences of her constant travels around the world. She was an androgynous, freethinking figure who was, despite herself, constantly trying to run away. Her chaotic love life is traced here by Gonçalo Vilas-Boas, who has studied her in depth. Born in Switzerland to a wealthy and influential family, she was educated at top private schools, and there were many doors that were open to her. But her deep inner sense of dissatisfaction ultimately manifested itself through addiction and imbalance. Her brief, tormented life (she died at just thirty-four) was filled with adventure, wars, drugs, suicides and depression; however, it is her charm that will always remain in our memories.

When it comes to the world of design – what it is, what it represents, and what it is for – Alice Rawsthorn is one of its most internationally respected voices, with a global reach across social networks and debating forums. She has been a critic and columnist for some of the most influential newspapers and journals of our times including the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of classics such as the widely acclaimed Design as an Attitude. In this exclusive interview for Electra given to design curator and critic Vera Sacchetti, Alice Rawsthorn talks about her life and works, and outlines her views of the world and the future, showing in the process her overarching optimism in the face of the challenges and risks involved, and defending design as an ‘omnipresent force’ and ‘agent of change’.

Numbers are the code of universal harmony, divine creation, magic, and also of scientific rationality, calculation and method. Cryptic knowledge is perfectly expressed in numbers, as if they were the emanation of a mathematical God. Our age pays little heed to numerology, but is obsessed with quantification and statistics, which have become the main tool of governance, rankings, ratings and generalised evaluation as a way of managing human and material resources. It is precisely because numbers are now so dominant and powerful (to the extent that politics has become a mere province of the wider economy), that Electra is devoting the ‘Subject’ section of this issue to this area. Here you will find articles about the philosophy of number, forms of digital art, modern governance through numbers, and the history of algorithms and their function in digital networks. These compulsory stops shine light on a variety of incursions into a vast universe that continues to expand in our age - the digital age. All the images dedicated to Numbers in this issue are by António Sena. Throughout a career that spans over five decades, signs, numbers and letters represent his attempts – successful or not – to interpret the world and everything that happens in it. His work also questions the demands, potentialities and illusions of human communication in all its variety of languages. In inviting António Sena to collaborate, Electra recognises an artist who, through his intellectual research and artistic practice, and integrity and persistence, has created a body of work with a considerable formal coherence that is unique in the world of contemporary art.

The American photographer John Divola has prepared a set of unpublished works for this edition of Electra. They are part of an ongoing series located in an air force base in the California desert that was decommissioned after the Cold War came to an end, and which has since remained like a veritable city in ruins. It is not the first time that John Divola aesthetically intervenes in abandoned spaces and then captures the results on film. As Afonso Dias Ramos demonstrates in the following essay introducing Divola’s work, the visual explorations that have been undertaken during this pandemic actually take up the artistic strategies that had marked his early oeuvre, in a surprising throwback of nearly half a century that is also a revisitation of contemporary art history. The images shown in this «Scoop» foreground ruins as a way to reposition photography in direct interaction with painting, sculpture, and installation, and thereby declining any distinctions between the witness or the participant, between the intervention and the document.

Political communication researcher Susana Salgado comments on a quote from Noel Gallagher, former Oasis vocalist. She warns that, ‘emotions trump facts’ in these times of ‘over-democratisation of the individual’.

Name: Paulo Nozolino. Profession: photographer. We can start with this simple bio. Guided by the interview below, we can then enter the ‘lab’ of this nomadic photographer, who crosses borders and is radically averse to serene places and their tranquil images.

On the seventh centenary of Dante’s death (1265-1321), Antonio Montefusco, professor in Medieval Latin Literature at the Universidade Ca’ Foscari de Veneza, discusses the poet of the Divine Comedy, who ‘invented the figure of the modern intellectual’ and introduced the ‘vernacular’ to poetry in the place of Latin. He looks critically at the ideological and political uses to which official commemorations of earlier centenaries have been subjected since the 19th century.

Ângela Ferreira was a pioneer in bringing to contemporary art topics and themes that are now omnipresent and are driving cultural debate. Having spent over thirty years researching the colonial past, the postcolonial present and the future on the horizon, her art has a consistency and coherence that has achieved national and international recognition. In this issue of Electra, Ângela Ferreira presents paintings made for future memories, based on murals shown at previous exhibitions. In the introductory essay for this portfolio, the curator and art historian Nomusa Makhubu writes, ʻI am drawn to the affective Ângela Ferreira Pan African Unity Mural I-X resonance enlivened by interlaced narratives [...in the Pan African Unity Mural...] re-sounding histories of exile, loss, struggle and defiance [...and also of optimism and hope...]. It is akin to what Tina Campt calls “affective frequencies”. To see what we don’t see, to pay attention to the resonances between each image and object, is to experience how “sublimely quiet images enunciate an aspirational politics”ʼ. The images that Ângela Ferreira shows here are thus a place in which visibility, inclusion and centrality are restored to those who have long inhabited the invisible peripheries of amnesia, exclusion and ignorance.

In the journal of the singer-songwriter Lula Pena, the reinvention of words (‘I didn’t find what I wanted in the dictionary’) is a condition for the reinvention of time (‘Sometimes one day is quite a lot and the eve of nothing much’). Written in a style that inquires into its own process, the text is made of sounds and images (‘graphic and phonographic remains’). Lula Pena writes, ‘Sounds are launched on the adventure of the written word and its verbal explorations, scouting for listeners’. This is the purpose of our ‘Book of Hours’, where time is the board for a game in which the only winners are those willing to bet everything.

The publication of António Franco Alexandre’s collected poems reveals the diversity of his poetry from one book to another, and also shows the author’s stringent formal and thematic poetic standards without being conventionally formalistic or content driven. It is this quality that has earned them pride of place in the field of contemporary Portuguese poetry.

It just so happens that sometimes we can’t find the right words, despite knowing where they are: on the tip of the tongue. It seems easy enough to recover those concealed, as, in a manner of speaking, they’re relatively to hand, but uncovering their lair isn’t enough to untangle the knot of forgotten words that memory has left behind. As for me? In the mirror, I’ve watched myself repeating new-normal, truly a concept old enough to know better. I could, and should, ignore these facts of my inner life, and I will do just that. Especially because behind this printed text there is another one that is brighter, which will never see the light of ink on paper, the light of this time tunnel in which we find ourselves – derived from the Latin novum, in the case of something new or never seen before, and normalis, the state of normality, or uneventful routine.