Beginnings still exist. Electra began a year ago and since then we have published five issues of this magazine dedicated to thought, art, literature, science and cul-tural criticism. Each one is a stroke that gradually draws the full face. This face is moveable and mutable, made of positions and oppositions, juxtapositions and superimpositions. It reveals itself in plural planes and variable geometries. It has diverse and complementary points of view. The more it changes and moves, the more it defines and affirms itself.

André Tavares is an architect, author of books on architecture and coordinator of Dafne Editora. He was the general curator of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale on The Form of Form in 2016. He begins his article by stating that the old town centres of Lisbon and Porto are full of rubble and waste from demolition and restoration work. What should be a promise for the future actually shows that we are building poorly and for immediate profit on the basis of principles bereft of the old idea of heritage.

The French writer and philosopher Michel Erman is a well-known biographer of Marcel Proust, to whom he has devoted several books. In this original essay, he talks about Proust’s relationship with money and what it represented in his work and life, enabling him to be ‘sometimes a friend and altruist, sometimes distant and domineering’. From the inheritance left to him by his parents to how he used it to assert himself in literature, from the mundane comedy to the means to facilitate amorous and sexual relationships, for Proust money was a tool for understanding the world and everyone’s place in it.

Michael Morris is an architect of Irish and US nationality. He lives in New York City, where he works on projects that connect architecture, art and science. He shared the Morris Sato Studio with his wife and partner Yoshiko Sato, who died in 2012. After Sato’s death, he took over the lead of her space architecture design studio and research group at Columbia University. In 2006, Sato and Morris initiated space projects with their former students and, in 2015, collectively formed the collaborative group SEArch+ (Space Exploration Architecture) to work with NASA on cutting-edge projects that examine the possibility of human living in other parts of space.

This interview is with Elisabeth Lebovici, a historian and art critic (in Libération newspaper and Art Press magazine, among others) and the author of important studies on contemporary artists. The conversation focuses on her book about the effect of AIDS on the art world: Ce que le sida m’a fait (2017), which won the Pierre Daix Award. As the title indicates, it is a hands-on account. In the 1980s and 1990s Lebovici joined highly active groups in the fight against the invisibility and extremely negative representations of HIV-positive people. And now her book tells all about the dread of the disease and its effects.
 

The writer and anthropologist Filip de Boeck has conducted extensive field research in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He describes the city of Kinshasa on the basis of two metaphorical elements: the hole and the mountain. The mountain metaphor is associated with its authoritarian, vigilant and ostensibly powerful colonial past. The hole metaphor refers to the post-colonial present of a megalopolis dominated by chaos and unable to offer its inhabitants the infrastructure they need for a decent life. The article is illustrated with photos by the photographer Sammy Baloji, who worked with the author on the project Suturing the City.
Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds (2016).

Jeremy Gilbert is an essayist, specialist in cultural and political theory and lecturer at the University of London. He is also a DJ. On the basis of this famously provocative quotation from Nietzsche, he tells us how matter can be mobile and creative. Linking oriental wisdom and western science, the ‘god that dances’ can be a good vantage point for looking at our times, these times of ‘great celebration’ everywhere, every hour and every minute, with their multiplicities and complexities.

The Brazilian curator and sociologist Cristiana Tejo describes and analyses the First Biennial of Latin-American Art in São Paulo, which was held in 1978. This one-off event was of great artistic, cultural, social and political importance, for one thing due to the controversy that it sparked. Some of its issues, questions and appeals are still current and productive today.
 

The Spanish theatre and opera director Rafael R. Villalobos is the most famous of the new generation. He is also a playwright, scenographer and wardrobe designer. He has enjoyed an expanding international career with projects in Spain, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom and Hungary. Some of his productions have been broadcast by the BBC and OperaVision. His production designs include Richard Strauss’s Elektra. In this diary, he uses lively, everyday language and a critical and creative energy to think and write about his life and work as a director and attest to his artistic, cultural and political awareness.

Young ideals were one of the driving forces behind the social, cultural and political history of the 20th century. These days, there is no longer a place for the ideals that were once a young people’s prerogative. What has triumphed today is youth as an ideal and aspiration, i.e. young style and its culture. This desire, which has ceased to belong to an age-group, and the difficulties of access to full adulthood have rendered the borders between generational categories more fluid and opened up an injustice between generations. Many of the privileges that adults enjoyed no longer exist for the younger generation. The very large share that the idea of youth holds in the social and aesthetic market does not correspond to young people’s actual situation. In some ways, they are a robbed generation and, on the other, only they are fit to keep up with the times, which have been accelerating at breakneck speed. This dossier covers these issues.

Manuel Gusmão performs an untimely exercise in this book. He includes in his poetry a strong political, interventional and militant dimension that echoes the heroic chant of some of Brecht’s poems. But just to complicate things, A Foz em Delta justifies its title by also flowing in a completely different direction, marked by elegiac characteristics.
 

This book, which she signs with a lower-case pseudonym, is the manifesto of a woman who was born in the United States in 1952. This woman, bell hooks, is also black. It is important to say ‘also’ because the whole issue of the book, as Marta Lança demonstrates, is the conjunction of a gender identity and a ‘racial’ identity.
 

A memory: in the 1980s, at the annual conference of American art historians, which in that particular year saw thousands of scholars gathering in the heart of Texas, a young ‘deconstructor’ after the Derrida model began his presentation without slides (used and abused by all the other speakers) and with the words, ‘No pictures, just concepts!’ The stunned audience shifted nervously in their seats.