With the title ‘Autobiography and the Novel’, published in Languages of Truth, the British writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie wrote an essay in which intelligence and malice play off each other prompting an inquiry and raising questions that come close to the ones tackled in the ‘Subject’ section of this issue of Electra. The latter also highlights and echoes the confusion that envelops these questions today, swelling like a powerful vortex.

Henry James is a great writer from the turn of the 20th century. An expert in human psychology and a refined stylist, he was the creator of a vast, powerful harbinger work, in which the theme of the meeting-confrontation of Europe with the United States appears insistently. In his work, the subtlety of the mysteries combines with the harshness of the conflicts. Born 180 years ago, his enigmatic personality traits and the surprising events of his life continue to generate enormous curiosity and fascination. Novelist, short story writer, essayist, literary critic and journalist, the renowned Irish writer Colm Tóibín is a devoted connoisseur of James, about whom he wrote The Master, a biographical novel translated into many languages. In this issue of Electra, Tóibín revisits the author of The Portrait of a Lady, to show the importance of houses in James’ life and work. From these, he gives us a picture full of truth and vigour of this tormented genius.

Wolfgang Tillmans, one of the most important artists in the global panorama of contemporary art, and nominated by TIME magazine this year as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world, has presented Electra with a series of previously unpublished photographs taken in the last years. The accompanying essay, authored by Afonso Dias Ramos, explores and situates these pictures within the context of a highly-acclaimed work of over four decades.

Critic and historian Hal Foster, one of the most influential and prolific authors on modern and contemporary art, design, architecture, and postmodernism, talks to Electra about the status and function of critical theory in the current political juncture. He revisits the journey which has taken him from the radicalism of the New York intellectual milieu during the 1970s, to the preparation of an upcoming book around the popular idea of a ‘banal aesthetics’.

Sepideh Karami is an Iranian architect, writer, teacher and researcher whose work brings architecture into domains as diverse as performing arts, literature and geology. Professor of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, she tells us here about the city where she chose to live and work, with a unique gaze, both near (where it finds itself) and far (from where it came). On her verbal journey through Scotland's capital, Sepideh tells us what she sees, what she deciphers, what she interprets and what she guesses. From buildings to gardens, from the general to the particular, from gestures to objects, from the ground to the sky, the author describes a city made up of many spaces and many times, many speeds and many layers of meaning. At the beginning, it is stated: ‘Edinburgh is the city of getting wet and dry in quick succession.’ And it is as if this climatic antithesis runs through the entire text to teach us how to feel Edinburgh and what happens there.

Raphaëlle Bacqué is a reknowned reporter for Le Monde newspaper and author of several books, including the acclaimed biography of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld Kaiser Karl. Drawing on a provocative quote from the great Chanel stylist, Bacqué offers us a fascinating portrait of the man who revealed so much in order to better hide himself.

In this interview, the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura looks back at his achievements, and at the key times and places in his career. He also reflects on the state of the profession and the conditions and contingencies architects experience, their social responsibility and the moral and aesthetic harm they can do, leaving their mark very visibly on the country.

Any history of modern contemporary culture in Brazil would not be complete without mentioning the unparalleled Semana de Arte Moderna (São Paulo, 1922). It was at this decisive, controversial and agitated event that Yvonne Daumerie – dancer, choreographer, singer, composer, instrumentalist, declaimer and teacher – performed. Brazilian curator, writer and critic Veronica Stigger speaks to us about this multi-talented artist and her almost forgotten and ignored passage through the world. Bringing to the present the traces of her existence in the past, it is as if Veronica wishes to let us see this ghost and her dance erased by time.

The life of writers, artists, philosophers and figures who perform public roles, or have become well-known for whatever reason, is not just the subject of erudite biographies. In our time, when the media reign supreme, the personalisation of every aspect of social, cultural and political life is everywhere. The relationship between life and work has become, in certain cases, an area that gives rise to scandals and controversies. This condition causes the work and actions of writers, artists, politicians and other public figures to be assessed through the filter of private morality. There is no dearth of recent cases that confirm this and we know the devastating effects that this can sometimes have. We need to understand that the factors that structure the public space today have generated a tendency towards the non-differentiation between the public and private, two spheres that had been separated by clear-cut borders since the Enlightenment. In the political realm, the exhibition of private life, personal gestures, idiosyncrasies and habits has become common, and sometimes obligatory, so as to satisfy tacit requirements. The people phenomenon, which used to be a territory circumscribed to gossip magazines, has expanded. And it has become commonplace to draw lines of overlap and conflict between life and work.

More than a decade after the Great Earthquake of Fukushima (East Japan, 2011), Taro Igarashi analyses, in this essay, the impact on architecture and art of a catastrophe of this magnitude and the lessons provided by the demands of reconstruction. The author is a historian and critic of architecture and a professor at the University of Tohoku, Japan. He was curator of the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice International Architecture Biennale, in 2008, and artistic director of the Aichi Triennale, in 2013. He is one of the authors of Louis Vuitton: Art, Fashion and Architecture (2009).

The staging, in Bayreuth, of The Ring of the Nibelung, directed by Valentin Schwarz, is the object of an analysis that considers it a failure due to the way it treats or omits the theological question in Wagner’s work.

Not so long ago we rarely encountered the verb ‘scrutinise’. And not even a glimpse of it in literary texts. We cannot pronounce or write such a word without crashing against its materiality, without feeling the friction and sound of its consonants.