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.