To invoke Friedrich Nietzsche at the start of what we write is always an attempt to look at what we are seeing with wiser and more unconstrained eyes, less obedient and less set in their ways than our own.

This beautiful and original evocation of Moscow, written for Electra, recalls different eras, political and cultural figures, memorable events and places of worship. The writer’s personal history intersects with that of the city and of a world that played out its destiny there. And it also talks of Eusébio and Port wine. The author, Yuri Slezkine, is a renowned historian and translator, born in Russia, who has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford. He is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on Russian history and has a book on the subject regarded as a work of reference.

A statement by Jean Genet, from 1973, about how art does not easily submit to the political categories of left and right, is the subject of a commentary in verse form — or perhaps rather a gloss or interpretation which extends it – by Regina Guimarães, a figure of many crafts and talents, in the realms of poetry, cinema, theatre and music.

This ‘Register’ recounts the story of the famous Hanuman book collection, created by publisher Raymond Foye and painter Francesco Clemente. Considered a cult collection of high bibliophilic value, it is ‘a portal on late twentieth century cultural life in New York City and San Francisco’, as well as ‘a remarkable example of bookmaking practices honed in the Indian village of Adyar, overlooking the Bay of Bengal.’ Thomas Dylan Eaton, the author of this essay, is a writer and curator. He has written for the most prestigious art and culture magazines such as Artforum, Afterall Journal, Bookforum, The White Review and Parkett, and has collaborated with the Tate Modern and the Imperial War Museum London.

Narcissism as a generalised social phenomenon that marks our time is a complex that gives rise to a psychosociological description. It manifests itself through the proliferation of images and reflections that use many media at its disposal (new technologies, the modern ‘machines of vision’ and communication, social media) to guarantee its basic needs: to exhibit and multiply itself. You do not need to know much about social psychology to understand that narcissism and its variants are responsible for this egotistical inflation and determine some of the characteristics that shape social life: hedonism, individualism, the culture of the instant turned exclusively towards well-being, the cult of celebrities, the triumph of images. These are characteristics that seep into the political milieu like a fluid. This is clearly visible everywhere in our current political panorama, reaching extreme forms in the rise and triumph of clowns who fascinate voters with their well-known ‘therapies’ and ultimately become heads of government. Although they are susceptible to a different gaze that requires other tools of analysis, identitarian claims are not strange to this culture.

Jean Malaurie, scientific explorer of the polar regions and defender of the rights of Arctic minorities, ethnohistorian, geographer and writer, was also director of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, and founder of the prestigious Terre Humaine book collection, which he directed. He is the author of a wide-ranging bibliography, including The Last Kings of Thule, which has become a classic. Ethnohistorian and art anthropologist Giulia Bogliolo Bruna, his collaborator, and author of Jean Malaurie: une énergie créatrice [Jean Malaurie: a creative energy], writes for Electra about this scholar whose life was a novel.

Taking his latest book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, as a point of departure, the acclaimed British writer and essayist Geoff Dyer talks with Electra about books, photographs and the sense of an ending, while exploring a wide range of topics from contemporary culture, from the renewed interest in late style to the increasing popularisation of autofiction as a literary genre, from the creative process of writing a text to an attentiveness to the world brought about by images.

Giancarlo Giannini's gigantic eyes in Pasqualino Settebellezze, the faces and wigs taking up the entire screen in Lina Wertmüller's Love and Anarchy. A mannerist palette. The light of the butcher's shop and the humanoids of The Brood, plus the bulbs that are pouches that are placentas in her body. They all form characters, or rather entities, situated in the threshold no longer human nor natural, but rather natura desnaturata, taken as the sprout of it all. Finally, and always in between, the inverted Disney hands or Mickey Mouse gloves, falling. They are brushes and mops since intelligence and sweeping intersect, according to Simone Weil’s clairvoyance. Manet and his warm and cold neutrals mastering asparagus and all the stillleben ad oleo it contains. Asparagus in nuptials with the milky white surface, already lying down, like a brush at the end of the day, put to rest. Following Rosalba Carriera's example, perhaps awkwardly but fine, I went for the pastels, which is the same as joy in Gravity&Grace. Everything is dust, as Li Po used to say.

Based on an exhibition, presented in 2024 at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK), and a seminar held at the same time at the Technical University of the same city, architect and researcher Gilles Delalex, founder of Studio Muoto and one of the curators of the French Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2023, answers an untimely question: similarly to various political ideologies — social democracy, liberalism, communism or fascism — can anarchist thought generate architecture? In order to answer this question, which crosses a historical perspective with an observation of the present, it is architecture which examines itself.

Bearing in mind the intellectual debates on the relationship between text and image in contemporary art and literature, Afonso Dias Ramos comments on and interrelates two of the most eagerly awaited publications of recent years: the catalogue of photographic materials that belonged to W.G. Sebald, and the original letters that John Berger exchanged with his son in the final years of his life.

‘Living in a bubble’ is worse than the witches’ cauldron − bubble bubble, toil and trouble. No good will come of black magic, but ‘living in a bubble’ is an insult and a strong one at that. Not even the elitist veneer of it appearing to be a cosmopolitan insult can soften the blow.