Let’s hazard this image, as a calculated necessity and a shrewd contingency: infrastructures are the unconscious of the world we inhabit and of the time in which we live.

In this conversation with Electra, renowned German filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl addresses the complexities of the constant evolution between art and technology in the age of Artificial Intelligence, as well as the present convergence between the rise in computer-generated images and the emergence of authoritarian regimes worldwide.

Queen of the United Kingdom and Head of the Commonwealth, Elizabeth II was born a hundred years ago. Her reign, the longest in British history, lasted for more than seventy years. Throughout that time, the world changed radically. Yet the Queen remained ever true to herself, adapting with subtle wisdom to the changing times. Many things came and went, but the Queen endured. Marc Roche, who met her, has written this essay for Electra in which he offers an original perspective on Elizabeth II, focussing on the attention she paid to her image. An expert on the British monarchy and the City, he has lived in London since 1985, where he served as correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde, among others. He is the author of a vast body of work, including landmark volumes, translated into many languages, on this Queen who has been portrayed by Andy Warhol and Lucian Freud, Cecil Beaton and Annie Leibovitz.

Anna Maria Maiolino is an artist of Italian origin who lives and works in Brazil, having achieved international renown. Among other prestigious awards and honours, in 2024 she received the Golden Lion at the 60th Venice Biennale, an accolade bestowed in recognition of her powerful body of work, which is characterised by great artistic originality and important anthropological, cultural, social and political significance. For this issue of Electra, the artist has prepared a portfolio of her work, accompanied by an interview which was conducted by American curator Helen Molesworth for the project The Forgotten Her Story. MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, in Lisbon, will be presenting a major exhibition by Maiolino, Terra Poética, until the end of August 2026.

‘Infrastructures’ is the theme of this issue of Electra. In the globalised world in which we live, this is a highly topical issue that mobilises research and knowledge from many disciplinary fields and has given rise to a field of study known as Logistics Studies. To speak of infrastructure is to evoke technical progress, the circulation of information and goods, the colossal logistics that enable the life of large metropolises, borders and geostrategic calculations, and the new technologies that brought about digital platforms and shaped the most current face of capitalism. The subject is therefore eminently political and not merely technical, since the power of those who control infrastructures is so great and formidable that it challenges both elected governments and the rules of democracies. Yet this power also has its darker side and its vulnerabilities

From Rio de Janeiro to New York, in her short forty-four-year life, Brazilian designer and art director Bea Feitler was everything and did everything. She created books, albums, posters and iconic covers, working for the most important American magazines of her time, while leaving her mark of creative and visionary talent on all of them: Harper’s Bazaar, Ms. Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair. She worked closely or collaborated with personalities such as Richard Avedon, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Marvin Israel, Andy Warhol, Ruth Ansel and Annie Leibovitz. She had the Midas touch: everything she touched turned into visual gold. This key figure in the history of graphic design is portrayed here by Serge Ricco, who, alongside other activities in the field of visual arts, was art director of the prestigious French magazine L'Obs.

Heidegger's lecture on the question of technology sparked a long history of debate, commentary and controversy. It also gave rise to a further question: to what extent does the philosopher genuinely help us to think about technology? There are many who have answered: it does not help at all. At the heart of this lecture lies the enigmatic statement ‘The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ Sociologist Vania Baldi takes on the challenge of commenting on this statement.

Turkish writer Kaya Genç strolls through his city, Istanbul, much like a flâneur who, as he wanders, uncovers the city’s cultural traces and historical layers, revealing it to be an exceptionally rich cultural metropolis.

With a career of remarkable international standing and a body of work distinguished by its artistic imagination and recognised technical creativity, Alexandre Estrela is Portugal’s representative at Biennale Arte 2026, in Venice. For this issue of Electra, the artist and his team have prepared a revelatory extension of the project, RedSkyFalls, presented at the Portugal Pavilion. The work was specifically conceived and designed for the pages of this magazine.

The city today tends to sprawl and blur into the expanse of the ‘urban’, which is everywhere and has no clear limits. It is this city without centre or periphery that the architect Rem Koolhaas has termed the ‘generic city’ and it is about this new urban reality that António Guerreiro writes here, drawing on an evocation of Henri Lefebvre and his book The Right to the City.

Reflecting on the publication, in the USA, of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, by Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins, Brazilian philosopher Eduardo Wolf takes a critical look at both the relevance and irrelevance of the concept of ‘Western tradition’, a concept which has been defended by some (such as the authors of this work) and contested by many since the mid-twentieth century. From Ancient Greece to Western modernity, there is a legacy in which some see Ariadne's thread running through the labyrinth of the world and others an ethnocentric instrument of domination. Eduardo Wolf is a professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Brasília, as well as a researcher, author, translator, contributor to Veja magazine and co-founder of Estado da Arte, belonging to O Estado de São Paulo newspaper.

Immigrant: a person who leaves their country of origin to settle in another for economic, political, family, educational, or other reasons. From the Latin immigrare: in (into) + migrare (to move, to change places). An immigrant is someone who enters a territory. The directional prefix in- marks a centre from which movement is judged as an act of entry. Emigrant, from ex (out of) + migrare, refers to the one who leaves; immigrant is the one who arrives. In both cases, we are speaking of the same person – the same body in motion – viewed from different perspectives. These two directional prefixes carry within them an entire geography of power.