As we look at time in an endeavour to understand it, we also need to listen to it. The voices, screams, murmurs, words, phraseology and silences of each span of time tell us what time it is.

The commonplaces and fixed ideas in the words spoken and voices heard are highly revealing, symptomatic and informative. They are a guiding line of shadow in a maze of light. It was not by chance that Gustave Flaubert regarded them with tireless diligence. His Dictionnaire des idées reçues was a manual of ethology

In art, architecture, design, science and technology, the 20th century was one of change, revolution and breaking with the past. It was a century of artistic movements, new doctrines, daring projects, radical experiences and cultural adventures. Coming in the wake of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts and founded by Walter Gropius a hundred years ago, Staatliches Bauhaus was fundamental to some of these changes. The people who worked with this school of architecture and design included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It had to move twice to different cities and lived under constant threat. It was closed by the Nazis in 1933, but everything it did in those few years lived on into the future. There is a before Bauhaus and an after Bauhaus. In this ‘Record’, the architect Ulf Meyer, author of Bauhaus: 1919-1933, tells the story of the school’s history and its presence in our world today.

Edmund de Waal is a contemporary artist, ceramicist and writer, whose book The Hare with Amber Eyes has been translated into many languages and hailed as a great literary and publishing success. His most recent exhibition, psalm, opened in Venice this summer to coincide with the Biennale Arte 2019. He came up with a portfolio for this edition of Electra, in which photographs of the exhibition are part of a poetic diary that recounts an inner and outer journey. This manuscript is full of themes from this writer-artist: memories, books, objects, senses and places. We see what we hear and hear what we see, because the words and images are the two sides of the coin with which we buy the world. ‘We are always from somewhere else,’ quotes de Waal. This is why we are all travellers and it is our journey that designs the space and the time with which we create our world.

These days, people everywhere are calling for a type of politics that places ethical requirements at its centre. It is time to question this stitching together of ethics and politics and the misunderstandings and consequences of this claim for the concept of politics. The response to this challenge comes, on the one hand, from Donatella Di Cesare, an Italian philosopher well-known for her books on Heidegger and the Jews (from the German philosopher’s Black Notebooks) and on the ‘philosophy of migration’, and, on the other, from Bruno Peixe Dias, a doctoral student in the area of political philosophy.

Money is not just a more or less fleeting and increasingly abstract universal medium. It is the cornerstone of society and its political administration, over which it has today total control. It is not a subject whose boundaries can be delimited though, as it is expanding in all directions. It travels round the planet at the speed of light and takes up all the space. Economics and financial sciences have only partial knowledge of money and it is a complete mystery to common mortals. If we want to find out a little more about it, we have to call upon other skills and disciplines that go beyond the discourse and concepts that have invaded our daily lives: psychoanalysis, anthropology, literature and art. This was what we did when putting this dossier together. We asked for contributions from a wide variety of sources, so that we could look at the very essence of money. And it is because its power is everywhere and determines everything, even when it cannot be seen, that it is so often the subject of metaphysical and theological theories and concepts. Or if we want to turn to pagan ideas, let us say that money is the ultimate shaman that we can call on in this completely secularised world.

Rio de Janeiro, the wonderful city, as it is called, has been revisited in its past and present by the pianist Gilda Oswaldo Cruz, who was born there and lived there for many years. The stunning natural surroundings between the sea and the hills, the violent social contrasts, and life in the favelas (slums) have all contributed to the effervescence of the city’s popular culture, of which samba and the Carnival are the most outstanding manifestations.

Briton A. J. P. Taylor was one of the most influential and controversial historians of his time, with a fundamentally important oeuvre on the political and diplomatic history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a pioneer in the use of mass media to disseminate history to a wide audience. Kathleen Burk is a lecturer and researcher at the University of London and author of the biography Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor. She has penned a portrait of this intellectual figure, who left no-one indifferent, for this number of Electra. His work still sparks passions and controversy, often on a par with those caused by the events and personalities that he studied.

For Álvaro Siza, drawing is his pact with the world and with himself. This highly renowned architect, who received the Pritzker Prize in 1992 for his work in so many countries around the world, never ceases to draw what he sees and what he imagines: buildings, objects, bodies, faces, figures (frequently his own), animals, landscapes, visions, dreams and sentiments. His drawings see and open eyes. They listen and they scrutinise. They play and they have fun. They mention and they measure. They think and they meditate.

In this essay, the Swiss researcher and architect Isabella Pasqualini looks at urban areas in search of her own space, where technology finds the subjectivity it needs to generate new objectivities. This intellectual and sensorial, individual and gregarious, real and virtual experience is part of the genealogy of geographic utopias, cultural mythologies and imaginary architectures of people who have designed ideal cities. Seen in this mobile, mutable light, the urban space turns into a stage for successive and simultaneous performances, a place of continuous creation that creates those who create it. This is why the people that live it are truly those who live in it.

A verse by Goethe was quoted in passing by philosopher Hannah Arendt in an essay on Brecht, in which she is highly critical of the effects of the poet’s political and ideological commitment in some of his poems and plays. The verse is the subject of comment by José Maria Vieira Mendes, who is a playwright, a member of Teatro Praga, and a writer of essays and an extraordinary diary (Arroios. Diário de um Diário, Dois Dias, 2015) – and who could not ignore Arendt’s mediation.

This interview with a Portuguese scientist, an internationally renowned immunologist, takes the form of a wide-ranging conversation conducted by Vasco Barreto, a researcher at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. They talk about António Coutinho’s career and the roles he has played in public life, notably as director of the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, and also about theoretical questions relating to the philosophy of science and the scientific process. In addition, they discuss pragmatic issues concerning science policy.

The Lourdes Castro exhibition at Musée régional d’art contemporain Occitanie in France was curated by Anne Bonnin. It was a revelation and was ‘greeted with amazement and enthusiasm’. This is what João Pinharanda tells us in his comments and critique. Starting from the exhibition and its itinerary, this curator and art historian opens up new perspectives in the way we look at such original, subtle, absorbing and fleeting work. Made of light and shadow, it seems to be suspended in space and time. Or rather, suspended between space and time. It is this eternity of the moment that makes its contemporaneity a fascinating visual enigma and an engaging poetic mystery.

The long-awaited publication of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality adds a new issue to those already existing: the theological debates on sex in the first centuries of Christianity. Art historian and literary critic João Oliveira Duarte highlights the importance that Foucault lent to the idea of desire and the object of desire in Christian questions about sexuality.

(Definition 1: slow march)

How do you bring overused words back into the world? Among countless hypotheses, let us think of the punch of two other words: seduction and courage. The beguiling challenge – and to accept it, you must be naive and susceptible to seduction. Or the brave, clear-headed creature that chooses the obstacle, the enemy.