There are books that invite us to take in the currentness of their astute observation and daring imagination — an actuality based on a sound foundation of clarity and the cornerstone of foresight. And we know that this actuality, which is so surprising yet so charming to us, does not exist by chance, luck or accident. It is a form of shrewd, creative intelligence that comes closer to the truth, all the while stealing from ensuing times, so as to be more itself in what has not yet been but is beginning to be.

Examining the city today with its metamorphoses and aggravated manifestations, such as its most eloquent sign, the megalopolis – which some see as decline and others as a mark of huge vitality – is an exercise that places us on terrain exposed to every aspect of political, social and cultural life. The city is a theme of huge and impressive scope. In the age we live in, there is a particular appeal for an acceleration of the urban phenomenon and the unlimited expansion of the city alongside, and based on the same logic as, the total emptying of the countryside, which is the other side of a dichotomy that seemed epitomised by literary depictions and a relic-filled imaginary. However, certain current conditions and circumstances – the pandemic, the possibilities for digital nomadism, the gentrification of an ever-broader urban swathe and the economic logic that reserves the city for the wealthy and visitors – have brought the countryside to a place where only the city once seemed to exist. Thus, the classic dichotomy has been revived at a time when the environmental mayhem caused by climate change is forcing us to re-examine the city and the countryside as a whole and not in the polarised terms that modernism has encouraged.

In this dossier ‘City, Countryside’,
we present images from two artists. Thomas Struth is one of the most internationally recognised German photographers. Among his most well-known series of work is one about city streets that may be summarised in a single photograph: Unconscious Places. It is from this series that Struth has chosen the images for
this ‘Subject’ section of Electra.
With a body of work of great originality, the Portuguese painter João Hogan obsessively painted the vastness and harshness of the landscape, its aridity and its silence, often giving his paintings a metaphysical resonance. Some of these images are shown in this dossier.
What these photographs by Struth and paintings by Hogan have in common is the absence of people, thus offering the viewer a contemplation that better reveals the structural elements of the City and the Countryside.

The encounter and the long-standing dialogue between the Italian critic and essayist Alfonso Berardinelli and the German poet, essayist and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger is an example of an elective affinity rich with ensuing consequences, such as a book by them both: Che noia la poetry. Pronto Soccorso per lettori stressati [What boring poetry. First Aid for stressed readers] (2006). This text by Berardinelli on the essayist Enzensberger prolongs this fruitful encounter.

On the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust, in a new essay written for Electra, renowned specialist Jean-Marc Quaranta shows how the work of the great French writer and all the investigations he has generated force us to see his life through other eyes, changing the very literary status of the author. It is, therefore, an authentic and original ‘reincarnation’. Jean-Marc Quaranta is a university professor and member of the Proust team. He is the author of Un amour de Proust. Alfred Agostinelli (1888-1914) and it was he who prepared, established, presented and annotated the edition of the novel Le Temps Perdu, which constituted a first version of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, published for the very first time in 2021.

The renowned German director and writer Alexander Kluge, who has worked with, among others, Theodor Adorno and Fritz Lang, has dedicated his life to thinking about images and their place in culture. For the ‘Portfolio’ of this issue of Electra, this fundamental figure of contemporary critical thinking talks with his collaborator, writer Ulrike Sprenger and Leander Gussmann, a researcher of artistic and cultural studies, about the analytical and cooperative method that he has developed in his monumental work. He shows how the images can be read, how they are superimposed and come into being, using an iconological grammar that is surprisingly revealing of the world and the time in which we live. True to his method, he also deals with current issues, such as the War and the opposition to it, and finally, with a central metaphor in his work: the garden. This conversation between Kluge and his interlocutors is made up of words and images, in a verbal-visual composition that, due to its originality and interest, constitutes a fundamental document that must not be lost.

By biographical circumstance, the writer and architectural historian Paulo Varela Gomes was an inhabitant and observer of the countryside and country living for over a decade. This experience offered him plenty of food for thought. For him, who had always been immersed in city issues and culture, it represented an important theoretical challenge, as you can gather in this passage from one of his texts where this question arises.

This is an original, previously unpublished story, written for Electra. With published novels, short stories and non-fiction books, the author, Navtej Sarna, is a recognised Indian writer. His recent historical novel Crimson Spring has been acclaimed by critics. He is a regular columnist on literary and political matters. A prestigious diplomat, he has represented India in several countries, having been ambassador to the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel.

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture, an agency that uses architecture as material evidence, leading independent investigations and partnering with international prosecutors and environmental and human rights groups to find, reconstruct, and expose violence. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Weizman discusses a decade of working across the boundaries between art and forensic analysis, journalism and the law, with advanced spatial and media investigations into key cases of state and corporate violence around the world.

Divided (or multiplied) between Lisbon and Trás‑os-Montes, between the city and the countryside, over the years, the painter Graça Morais has kept an intermittent diary, where she records, in images and words, her impressions and reflections on what she sees and experiences. In this diary, she draws the fruits of the earth, animal figures, human faces and victims of war, accompanying those visual notes with direct and quick verbal commentary. In this ‘Book of Hours’, which corresponds to different times, a few unpublished pages of the artist’s diary are revealed. Running alongside a vast and renowned work, they develop a discontinuous, yet endlessly illuminating dialogue.

The current war in Ukraine, caused by the Russian invasion, is what prompts Viriato Soromenho-Marques to go back to another armed conflict, the First World War, in order to analyse the nationalist and euphoric wartime discourses cultivated in German cultural and intellectual circles.

‘With its grand title O Problema da Habitação [The Housing Problem], Daniel Malhão’s project is a set of images resulting from a process of permanent wandering through the city. In fact, through two cities: Lisbon and Vienna […] with no programme other than stopping for long enough to look at that which has no history, or at that which has not been captured by its history.’ The art critic and curator Delfim Sardo presents the collection of photographs that make up this ‘Metropolitan’ in an essay that is itself a wandering through the History of Photography that leads to the history of these photographs. Represented in important collections and with work shown in several national and international exhibitions, Daniel Malhão is a recognised contemporary Portuguese photographer, whose work has been marked by a close connection of photography with architecture.

The Italian philosopher wrote a book about Hölderlin, focusing on the second part of his life, the phase of madness, from 1807 to 1843, the year of the poet's death. For these thirty-seven years the poet lived in a house on the River Neckar, in Tübingen, under the care of the carpenter Ernst Zimmer and his wife. What does it mean to inhabit, what does ‘habitual’ or ‘inhabiting’ life mean? This is the central question of Agamben's book, read here by Bernardo Vaz de Castro.

Within the contemporary rogues gallery, the oligarch is a composite character. James Bond’s soviet adversary abandons the bureaucratic fervour and discovers the libidinal excess of commodities. Rasputin leaves behind the palatial intrigue to become a wise guy who bribes the president of the parish council. The Bolshevik who seized the tsar’s throne dies and is replaced by a small-time nightlife entrepreneur.