To speak, anew, of the new is to ask time to give us the words with which it becomes another − or with which it shows itself to us as different in its flow, handing us the signs that could say, like Arthur Rimbaud: ‘Je est un autre.’ It is in that movement of change, rupture, revolution, heresy, revelation, that verbs, with their tenses, indicating time, pass from the past to the future and that nouns, with their power, name that which is being born, emerging, breaking through, showing itself and being said.

Taking as his starting point a classic quote from Charles Péguy, author Christian Salmon, who was Milan Kundera’s assistant, reflects with great originality on the relationship between our current times and Greek antiquity, bearing in mind the ‘nostalgia for the ancients and the post-modern appetite for heroes and stories’.

One of the characteristics of our time, which can be observed in many domains and from different perspectives, is the tendency (or trend) – and this word is already part of the complex – to cultivate and give the greatest privileges to everything that presents itself as new, that conforms to the general regime of newness as a social and cultural imperative. In this regime, the new is not that which interrupts the course of the world and time (as were the phenomena that followed the revolution model; the artistic avantgardes, for example), but that which perfectly adapts itself to the spirit of the epoch, the futility of the time, the prevailing ‘neopathy’. Therefore, the attitude that promotes the new as a great imperative which forms on the surface of actuality is not incompatible with a conservative position. The new as a commandment fully satisfies the desires of homogenisation that inevitably inhabit culture, at a time when even heritagisation and museumification are trying to invent factors of novelty.

In 1938, at the age of 31 years and with a remarkable future scientific career ahead of him, physicist Ettore Majorana, a disciple of Physics Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi – who considered Majorana a genius –, disappeared at a time when Italy was going through turbulent political confrontation. To this day, no one really knows what happened. Since then, the mystery of Majorana's disappearance has never ceased to intrigue, causing rivers of ink to flow and generating strange hypotheses and theories. Among others, the acclaimed author Leonardo Sciascia dedicated a book to him: La Scomparsa di Majorana [The Disappearance of Marjorana]. It is this enigmatic case that mathematician Umberto Bartocci, formerly a professor at the University of Perugia, revisits in his essay for Electra, not shying away from advancing his theories on this dramatic, radical disappearance.

In the field of political theory, there is today heated discussion about the metamorphosis and future of the party form, an institution which played a fundamental role in the construction of the modern body politic, but which, as a mass party, has now reached its end. To address this issue, we called on two ‘politologists’: sociologist Pedro Magalhães, a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, and Damiano Palano, professor of Political Philosophy and author of Bubble democracy. La fine del pubblico e la nuova polarizzazione [Bubble democracy. The end of the public and the new polarisation]. Two reflections that coincide considerably in their diagnosis, but which sometimes differ in the conclusions they draw.

The ‘Anthropocene event’ has put geology and a few geologists centre stage, but conflicts arose within this scientific realm that sometimes had little to do with science. The geologist and palaeontologist Jan Zalasiewicz, emeritus professor at the University of Leicester, interviewed here, is a well‑known scientist. Responding to the decision made by a subcommission of the International Union of Geological Sciences, he made the point that, based on current research, there is undisputable scientific evidence that supports the concept that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch. The atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen called this epoch the ‘Anthropocene’.

In this ‘View of Delft’, novelist and essayist Daniel Saldaña París writes about New York, the city where he currently lives, dividing himself between this city and his native Mexico City. In this account, there is at the same time both closeness and distance, coming from a gaze that travels from the outside, becoming interior and even intimate in the discovery he makes of this fascinating North American city, comparing it with other cities and evoking everything about it that he has read, seen and lived.

In this ‘Book of Hours’, Lise de la Salle talks of her profession as a pianist, sharing her daily intimacy with music and reflecting on what it means to her. Born in France, this pianist, who has been honoured with the most distinguished awards for her performances and recordings, has played with prestigious orchestras and eminent conductors such as Lorin Maazel, Sir Neville Marriner and Sir Charles Mackerras. Speaking of her concerts, she says, ‘All those hours of hard work, doubts, impatience and questions make sense at that precise moment of absolute communication with my audience.’

Isabella Ducrot is an artist, writer and collector, in whose work fabrics play a key, even foundational role. These fabrics, which have distant or near origins in both time and space, are the bearers of memory, variety, originality and truth. At the age of 94, her artistic recognition and international media acclaim continue to grow. In her studio, located in the magnificent Palazzo Dora Pamphilj, she continues to work, a modern Penelope who weaves but does not need to undo her work in order for it to become infinite. It is against this backdrop of a new ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ that this conversation on behalf of Electra takes place. Isabella Ducrot talks to Leander Gussmann and Nora Iosia, the person in charge of her studio, in a tone in which the intimacy of her voice reaches us with the same subtlety as the intimacy of her highly creative work, which we also have the privilege of showing in this ‘Portfolio’.

On the 500th anniversary of Luis de Camões’ (debatable) year of birth, José Augusto Bernardes, at the invitation of Electra, writes about the life and work of this great Portuguese poet, and about the politics of memory, the teaching of Camões works and his contribution to the modern idea of literature. This professor and researcher coordinated the Inter-University Centre for Camonian Studies and was the director of the General Library at the University of Coimbra. He is the Commissioner-General of the Commemorations of the V Centenary of the Birth of Luis de Camões, and has published a vast body of work on authors and literary themes, particularly from the 16th century, the Portuguese ‘golden age’.

This ‘Metropolitan’ takes Neom as its theme, a colossal urban architectural project currently being constructed in the remote deserts of Saudi Arabia, causing fiction to imitate reality. Due to its bold objectives (‘to build a city to “reset” urban living’) and the financial and technological resources it mobilises, this complex project is subject to both great aspirations and controversies, raising fundamental questions which have important ethical, cultural, social and political implications. The author, João Bravo da Costa, is an architect with a recognised international career which began in the studios of three Pritzker Prize winners: Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. Knowing this region of the world well, he combines personal experience with innovative theoretical reflection in this essay written for Electra.

If words were tangible objects, ‘innovation’ would be an object of indefinite shape, made of ordinary plastic. Something that is everywhere: in the wind, stuck to the ground, floating around on endless islands in the middle of the ocean. Swirling in the Earth’s orbit; embedded in our lungs, flowing in tiny particles in our blood. A shapeless, colourless thing that, through a quantum leap of some uncertain alchemy, can take on any configuration, any colour.