We imagine what could be and so we see what would be. That is why the imagination constructs reality and reality is added to and magnified by the imagination. If each of the letters composing the words of this Editorial had their own colour, these pages would catch our eye in a very different way from that of the text you are now reading.

In conversation with Electra, renowned feminist art historian and curator Tamar Garb reflects on the multiple geographies that have made up her life and work, from Cape Town to Paris and London, and the critical challenges of engaging differently with culture in Africa and in Europe at a time of heightened political tension and crisis.

Kaya Genç is a renowned novelist, essayist and journalist, winner of the European Press Prize and holder of a PhD in English literature. He comes from Istanbul, the same city where the great German Romanist and philologist Erich Auerbach went into exile and wrote his masterpiece, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. This text by Kaya Genç is precisely about the fascinating figure of Auerbach.

The ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra comprises seven articles from various disciplines. While colour presents itself to our eyes with such clarity that it appears unquestionable, it remains enigmatic – an ‘illusion’ described by Newton’s analysis of the light spectrum, rather than an inherent quality of objects. Colour is ever-present; nothing exists without it. What sometimes exist are neurological pathologies that do not ‘process’ colour or only process a certain colour. Its enigmatic character remains unresolved despite scientific knowledge from other disciplines, as well as empirical knowledge gathered about it. Colours play a role in a multitude of practices, such as art, architecture, design and politics, shaping both the human-made world and the natural world. They are so evident and natural to our eyes that we forget to reflect on them, unless it is from a perspective that captures them in their conventions and systems of meaning: colour as expression, symbol, decoration, universal language, constructed and codified by historical and cultural factors. Colour brings diverse viewpoints and is connected to ethics, with chromophobia and chromophilia representing two key attitudes. Cultures known for their exuberant use of colour are contrasted with those that favour a more moderate approach. Art history also reveals another contrast: between colour and form.

Whoever saw her could never again stop seeing her. On the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the enduring universal icon Marilyn Monroe, the renowned Italian philosopher Mario Pezzella, a specialist in film aesthetics, writes about who Marilyn was – with her innocently guilty beauty – and what the world turned her into. He tells us how, suspended between fame and emptiness, she lived her tormented life as a woman, as well as her dazzling career as an actress, in a desperate search for a face that would not deny her own. In this essay of great interpretative depth, this former professor at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa states: ‘Her life is marked by a desperate effort to make her acting coincide with her inner soul, an attempt she never fully succeeded in achieving.’

Jorge Martins, besides being an artist celebrated for the magnificence of his painting and drawing, made it clear, with the publication of his Cadernos, 1964–2020 [Notebooks 1964-2020], that he is the author of a vast body of thoughts and reflections, in fragmentary form, on painting, drawing, art in general, and the tropisms of the historical time he has lived through. Owing to his theoretical and reflective disposition, we invited him to comment on a famous quotation from Picasso and to ‘illustrate’ the text with two of his own paintings.

Electra has the rare privilege, in this issue, of revealing unpublished works by the great writer, poet and visual artist Henri Michaux (1899–1984). These works will subsequently be exhibited in three galleries in Munich, Zurich and New York. An insatiable traveller of the outer and inner worlds, Michaux was a key figure in 20th-century European intellectual life. The author of a body of work of inexhaustible originality and great experimental, existential and artistic audacity, he forged unexpected links between different forms of knowledge and wisdom, genres and disciplines. Michaux was constantly searching for new languages while rejecting fixity, stability and déjà vu. The important drawings presented here, which form part of the Henri Michaux Archive, are accompanied by a beautiful text by curator Tim Geissler.

Jeremy Fernando was born and still lives in Singapore, and it is about his city that he has written this text – in a distinctly personal vein. A writer, multimedia artist and curator, his work lies at the crossroads of several disciplines. He attended the European Graduate School, where in 2009 he presented his doctoral thesis, supervised by the American philosopher Avital Ronell.

In this ‘Portfolio’, we leaf through the pages of Electra, and at the same time, leaf through the pages of the book it brings to us. This book has been modified, recreated and reconfigured, using cut-outs and drawings, by the imagination and skill of Sonia Gomes, one of Brazil’s most internationally renowned artists. With exhibitions in the world's most prestigious museums and galleries, she is represented in major collections such as those of MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the National Gallery of Art in Washington; Tate Modern in London; and the Museu de Arte e Pinacoteca in São Paulo. The portfolio prepared for this edition of Electra is presented by curators João Mourão and Luís Silva, who observe: ‘These volumes are not just transformed objects; they are testimonies of a gesture that rewrites the world through its very material.’

In this ‘Metropolitan’, we publish an interview with architect Neil Leach led by Lucinda Correia. Here, the author of Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects discusses the highly topical themes of his latest book and reflects on both the future of cities and the role of architects. A Cambridge graduate, Leach has been a researcher at NASA as well as a professor at Harvard and Columbia. He is the author of an extensive bibliography and is now a professor at Florida International University in Miami. Lucinda Correia is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon.

In a book published some years ago, Pankaj Mishra described the dawn of the twenty-first century as the Age of Anger. Perhaps one day the era we are now living through will also be remembered as the years of the ‘Great Polarisation’. At the very least, over the past decade the word polarisation has increasingly been used to describe the state of our democracies and of public debate, as well as the ‘extreme’ choices made by voters. Yet despite its frequent use, it is rarely clear what people actually mean when they speak of polarisation.