The word ‘architecture’ is used in English, but speaks ancient Greek (and later learned Latin), since it is there that it finds the origins and foundations of the two terms that compose it etymologically: arkhé (chief, master) and tékhton (construction, builder, worker). In this way, we can conclude that in the word ‘architecture’ there is the sense of directing workers (many today would say: lead) and that the architect is the one who directs (leads) them.

‘When I went to Harvard, people thought that social housing was not architecture’, recalls architect Alejandro Aravena in this interview given to architect and researcher Ana Vaz Milheiros, for Electra. Distinguished with the Pritzker Prize in 2016, Alejandro Aravena is known worldwide for the originality of his work, in which the relationship between architecture, housing, society and nature is of paramount importance. In this conversation, punctuated by themes that are present in the plural activity that he has been developing, Aravena also talks about the experience of designing and building in Lisbon.

The woke movement, or, to use a more appropriate name, the woke injunction, is a war cry that has summoned new forms of struggle and antagonisms to the public space where exacerbated stances are taken. Although in a serene manner, the two opposing texts in this section participate in this division: that of the Belgian writer and philosopher Véronique Bergen, who sees in 'wokism' a legitimate desire for emancipation that, however, 'falls into the opposite', and that by Carolina Flores, Portuguese philosopher and researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who conducts the anti-woke critique.

Idleness, leisure, work, free time, entertainment: these concepts and figures, around which the themed dossier presented here is built, form a constellation inhabited by many tensions which have been given a certain movement by our time. There are oppositions that have disappeared or been replaced by others; there are expansions and triumphant positions, which is the case of leisure, as would be expected in a society that has placed work at its centre and expelled idleness, like someone who eradicates a vice or an evil. Currently, activities that were the offspring of idleness (arts, literature, sciences, philosophy, etc.) have been assimilated into work and thus fall under its regime. Our relationship with accelerated time and the triumph of the merchandised form, to the point where leisure itself has been totally captured, largely determine the types of leisure and its status in our time. At the same time, programmed compulsory entertainment has monopolised extensive swathes of culture and become a task which extends those that fall under the category of work. All this is proof that the boundaries between some of these entities have dissolved, or at least weakened.

‘Within the circle of scholars and experts, Gadda is considered a classic of the twentieth century, alongside giants of the international scene such as Proust, Musil, Joyce, Pessoa, Céline, Nabokov, or Beckett’, we are reminded. It is of the great writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, who was born in Milan in 1893 and died in Rome in 1973, as well as his labyrinthine and complex work and its reception that Lucca Mazzocchi writes. Professor at the Universities of Milan and Oxford, Mazzocchi is a specialist in Italian literature of the 20th century, having studied in particular the work of Gadda, an author who exists to be discovered.

With this piece, photographers and editors André Príncipe and José Pedro Cortes continue the series conceived for Electra, which began with Hisham Mayet, in Tangier, and continued with Youssef Rakha, in Cairo. This time, they spoke at length with the great French photographer Bernard Plossu, at his home in La Ciotat. Then they took a boat to the island of Corsica. In a conversation that became very intimate, they talked about life, travel, the passion for the desert, the passing of time, photography, photographers, photo books and also the work that Plossu has done in Portugal. At a certain point, Plossu commented: ‘And it's true, good photographers dance. And probably the closest art to photography is neither cinema nor literature, it's dance. A good photographer is graceful.’ Like dance and photography, this conversation is a way of giving people and things movement and light that take them beyond themselves.

Some time ago Pope Francis spoke about homosexuality and his words gave rise to various conflicting remarks. José Manuel dos Santos revisits the Pope’s statement, examining it from a historical perspective that allows us to consider it a symptom of the current state of the Church.

Ann Cotten is an Austrian poet and essayist, born in the United States, whose work, recognised for its originality and plurality, has been published by the prestigious German publisher Suhrkamp. Here, the writer introduces us to Steyr, a ‘statutory city’ in Upper Austria, named after one of its two rivers. In understanding the journey to get there, we begin to form a notion of what we are going to find, in a powerful association of nature with historical and cultural memory and with its industrial factory heritage. In this text, in which the impersonal precision of objective information is combined with a personal and subjective look, we are given a portrait of a land that Ann Cotten visited to meet friends who ‘are master skiers and keep a mountain hut for hiking in summer and a chalet for winter sports’.

In conversation with design critic and curator Frederico Duarte, Dutch graphic designer, researcher and professor Ruben Pater talks about his books and his conception of design as a practice of citizenship. This ‘Metropolitan’ is about bringing design closer to the subjects which help us better understand our place and our role in the city (or in the polis).

In this Scoop, we feature twenty-one previously unpublished drawings by Gonçalo Pena. His work, which combines intensity, abundance and movement, both registers the artist’s presence in the world and captures the reflection of the world on the artist himself. These drawings by this fertile creator of images and signs come from one continuous sketchbook. They are exclamations which speak clearly and enigmatically of the Aristotelian three kingdoms of nature: animal, vegetable and mineral. Like marks left in the passing of time, they bear witness to Gonçalo Pena's roving gaze. The imagination behind the images is his way of putting himself on a level with what is happening in the world.

Taking on the labyrinth, the literary critic and art history researcher, João Oliveira Duarte, writes on the vast volume that brings together all the critical work of Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, to which the poet gave a simple descriptive title Poesia Portuguesa Contemporânea [Contemporary Portuguese Poetry].

A person reaches their destination after a long journey and comes across an obstacle. Standing exactly between this person and their becoming, an enormous rock mass, heavy as lead, a skyscraper. It is unsurpassable. The only way to overcome is to summon the prefix trans-, the one that catapults, ignores borders and penetrates into obstacles. The harbinger of metamorphoses.