Down the ages, human animals have looked to other animals to confirm their own superiority or inferiority, to vindicate or vilify themselves, and to establish their own identity and otherness, by examining what sets them apart and what they have in common. Humans have either exalted or condemned animals, casting them as gods or demons, sovereigns or slaves, tormentors or victims, free or captive, living beings with their own dignity or merely disposable objects.

Drawing on a famous quote from Flaubert’s correspondence, which served as Marguerite Yourcenar’s catalyst for Memoirs of Hadrian, Benedikt Eckhardt, a German historian, classics professor, and author of a vast and renowned body of work, clarifies what we currently know about a past that does not pass and resonates in our present.

Hisham Mayet is one of those figures capable of providing literature and cinema with characters that defy oblivion. Born in Libya and educated in the UK and the US, he makes the world a never-‑ending journey. Living between reality and its fiction – or between fiction and its reality – his memories, gestures, actions and works cover many times, spaces, changes and visions.

Filmmaker, photographer, editor, researcher, musician, writer, creator, adventurer, traveller and world citizen, he builds a life lived against the ordinary in everything that he says and does. His interests include art and politics, the self and the other, the internal and external, the past and future, the here and there.

In the week in question, Hisham was in Tangier. For this issue of Electra, the photographers and editors André Príncipe and José Pedro Cortes went there to meet him, to hear him recount his life, and then complemented that story with a visual essay. They spoke to the great conversationalist for hours and came to the conclusion that he was even more fascinating than they had imagined. This is an interview-portrait-feature attentively and eagerly carried out In the First Person. To read it is to hear a voice measured (and modulated) by many voices and to look at an image mixed (and crossed) with many images.

A city is also made of the intentions, desires, gestures and acts that fill it with other movement and cover it with different rhythms. To observe it in its streets and obstacles, to unveil it where it opens and closes up, to act performatively on the city is, at the same time, to confirm and transform it, to traverse and probe it, to surpass and transcend it, to preserve and disturb it. It is to impart an instability to its stability, an ephemerality to its continuity, a departure to its permanence, a metamorphosis to its form. Performance art is a praxis: we transform ourselves by transforming, we become what we are and what we are not. This is what preoccupies Ana Pais, a theatre critic, professor and researcher, and the editor of Performance in the Public Sphere.

The focus on animals (and animality), as well as the idea that humans have duties towards them and that it is intolerable to treat them as ‘things’ and deny them the faculty of feeling and suffering, has become one of the great issues of our time. It is present not only in civic movements that are highly active in the public sphere, but also in the social and human sciences, where an important field dealing with animals has emerged. Ethics, politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy: today these disciplines are mobilised in an extensive operation that rescues animals from the silence to which philosophical thought – but not literature or art – has condemned them. The articles presented here deal with this type of reflection, in an interdisciplinary approach.

The writer, literary critic and literature professor Éric Marty – author of Bref séjour à    Jérusalem – recounts his wanderings around Tel Aviv. He focuses on the city’s modernity and cosmopolitanism, which endow Israel with a different face than the one revealed by Jerusalem.

The partial destruction of Notre-Dame by fire and Emmanuel Macron’s immediate response, promising that the cathedral would be rebuilt in record time, prompted a public discussion among experts on the forms of that reconstruction and the politics of heritage conservation (meaning also: the politicisation of heritage). This is the subject matter of the next three articles, written by Salvatore Settis, who signed an open letter to the French president demanding that the Heritage Code be respected; Carlo Pùlisci, an Italian art historian, who has published extensively on cathedrals, churches and the culture of restoration; and Pedro Levi Bismarck, an architect and researcher at the Porto University Faculty of Architecture. We are confronted with three different points of view, encompassing cultural memory and the heritage crisis (Settis), the history and culture of restoration (Pùlisci), and a political critique of conservationist logic and rhetoric (Bismarck).

She was born into great wealth but died destitute. Every day from birth until death belonged to her. She said that she wanted to turn herself into a work of art. Muse, patron and socialite; eccentric, excessive and extravagant; free, liberated and libertine, her life was a constant performance. She collected herself with the greed and obsession of frustrated collectors. She was painted, drawn, sculpted and photographed by dozens of artists. She multiplied her image to become someone else, which was the only way she could be herself. She threw the wildest parties, sported the most original dresses and wore the most shocking makeup. Her realm extended to houses and palaces in Milan, Rome, Venice, Capri, Paris and London. The ‘futurist marchioness’, as Marinetti called her, set trends and anticipated artistic and cultural attitudes in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The work of Magali Reus, a renowned contemporary artist nominated in 2018 for the prestigious Hepworth Prize, has been exhibited in leading galleries and museums. Born in Holland, she has lived in London for almost two decades. In this Portfolio, commissioned for Electra, the artist presents her photographic work for the first time. The images shown here are accompanied by an essay written especially by the American novelist, poet and curator, Andrew Durbin, editor of Frieze Magazine. He says: ‘I have always seen Reus’s work as an art of possible and impossible objects for possible and impossible places and people.’ He adds that the Portfolio is an invitation ‘not only to feel more, but to look closer’.

Jean Starobinski, who died last March in Geneva, his hometown, has been described as the greatest literary critic of the 20th century. But ‘literary critic’ does not do justice to this man who held degrees in classical studies and medicine (he worked as a hospital intern for five years). He showed great insight in his analysis of the history of ideas, literature and art, and practiced thematic reading and interpretation like no other. The history and representations of melancholy recurrently appear in his work, as mentioned by António Guerreiro, whose text recovers part of an interview given by ‘Staro’, as his friends called him, during a conference in Porto in July, 1990. Author of a brilliant study on Rousseau, he left a lasting mark on 18th-century studies. It was mainly from that era’s soil and subsoil that he took the mask motif, which radiates throughout his work and attaches itself to his own face. This is shown by Barbara Chitussi, who continues here the interpretation of Starobinski’s work initiated in an essay entitled Jean Starobinski e la conoscibilità della maschera.

Jean Starobinski, who died last March in Geneva, his hometown, has been described as the greatest literary critic of the 20th century. But ‘literary critic’ does not do justice to this man who held degrees in classical studies and medicine (he worked as a hospital intern for five years). He showed great insight in his analysis of the history of ideas, literature and art, and practiced thematic reading and interpretation like no other. The history and representations of melancholy recurrently appear in his work, as mentioned by António Guerreiro, whose text recovers part of an interview given by ‘Staro’, as his friends called him, during a conference in Porto in July, 1990. Author of a brilliant study on Rousseau, he left a lasting mark on 18th-century studies. It was mainly from that era’s soil and subsoil that he took the mask motif, which radiates throughout his work and attaches itself to his own face. This is shown by Barbara Chitussi, who continues here the interpretation of Starobinski’s work initiated in an essay entitled Jean Starobinski e la conoscibilità della maschera.

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) and Dora Maar (1901–1997), two women and two artists. In their time, the fact that they were women severely hindered their careers as artists. For that reason, today it is impossible to look at their work without considering what restricted, governed and limited them. The retrospectives presented in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay and Centre Pompidou showcase this work, which was interwoven with the artists’ lives, where the potential and risk they represented had to be conquered. This is what the historian, researcher and curator Helena de Freitas tells us, with critical and perceptive intelligence. Her words are infused with the proud and courageous melancholy with which these artists affirmed themselves in a world that denied them.

The verb to contaminate, from Latin contaminare (‘to deteriorate by mingling, to sully, to defile by touching’), lends itself to discursive resourcefulness producing a fair range of specific uses, from a particular action on food, water or the environment to politics or language and literary processes.