The best questions answer themselves. What happened between the first editorial we published and the one that is now being written? A journal happened – this journal, which the inaugural text discussed much as Hamlet speaks of his father’s ghost. Electra was written, published, read, and seen; it was reported and reviewed.

The relationship between the public sphere and privacy has been completely changed in our time, similarly to what happens in the relationship between the individual (that invention of the Enlightenment) and society.

The effects of May 1968 can be found in many current forms of struggle and revolt, where a new political awareness is being manifested — proof that the movement which erupted in Paris precisely 50 years ago had a highly mobilizing effect and cannot be reduced to a meaningless event: this is what American historian Kristin Ross shows us.

Stupidity is of all times but each time has its own stupidity. Flaubert inspired us by defining the forms of a stupidity that is neither the eternal nor the timeless type. Instead, this stupidity appears as the symptom of an age, lending it its features — i.e. the platitudes, preconceptions, and worn-out words that form, in their rigidity and conceit, manifestations as hard as rock. In our time of artificial intelligence, the purpose here is to highlight, analyse, and question some of the figures of contemporary stupidity, which cannot be entirely identified without us turning to another word of the same semantic field: idiocy.

Nick Cave sings: Goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil. With this, he seems to have put his life and his work into words.

Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets — written between 1937-1941 and forbidden since the end of World War Two — aroused once again a violent polemic at the end of last year, when Gallimard announced it was going to republish them in a critical edition and, soon after, following some of the public reactions, gave up 100 diagonals on the project. On this controversial issue, we publish here the differing views of two authoritative voices on the matter: Pierre-André Taguieff, author of a remarkable essay on Céline’s anti-Semitism, and Serge Klarsfeld, one of the great activists in France for the rights of deported Jews.

In the diary written by the New York gallerist Ted Bonin for Electra, personal time and world time cling to each other in an endless embrace. In the days recorded, presence is a machine of absences. Here, what is found comes with what has been lost: artworks bring faces and faces bring deaths. Through these words, which sadden and cheer, travel the questions time asks art and life. Days crossed by the light and shadows of a city where nothing stops. At the end, an unpronounced name – and silence is the voice of a threat.

In the series of drawings he selected for Electra, North American artist Dean Monogenis imagines the world before a new flood, conceiving this Portfolio as an artwork in itself – as a painting or a sculpture. In his work, space is a time that becomes space. Imagination is construction, utopia is reality, and the past is the future.

In the eyes of a poet born and living in Barcelona, this city has always attracted visitors and travellers, but has never easily lent itself to a complete knowledge and understanding. Today, swamped by tourists who think they see everything, it remains a mystery.

Italian writer Salvatore Settis is an art historian known for his public intervention and essays on the threats raised by political and economic management to cultural heritage. This is one of the topics approached in this interview, which also deals with the pressure that historical cities are subjected by tourists, as well as the role and responsibility of architects.

At the end of his life, Barthes wrote a sentence that shows some scepticism towards modern literature, whose most radical experiments he had always adhered to or at least taken an interest in. Éric Marty, editor of the complete works of Roland Barthes, comments on this sentence and explains the context within which it was born.

The Picoas Tower, designed by architects Patrícia Barbas and Diogo Seixas Lopes, demands the resumption of an insistent debate on the history of skyscrapers, their problematic relationship with the city, and what they represent in urban policies.

Abjection, with its violent effects on the viewer, has become the matrix of a trend in contemporary cinema. It includes forms of representation that, in their excess, work as instruments of torture. And that excess raises problems, which are not only aesthetic but also ethical and political.

A retrospective of the work of Álvaro Lapa at the Serralves Museum showed us very clearly a complex and unique artist in the landscape of 20^th-century Portuguese art — an artist establishing a dense, productive dialogue with other disciplinary fields such as literature and philosophy. Reason enough for two different critical approaches: one by José Gil, the other by João Pinharanda.

At the long border that separates the real from the fantastical, at that long border inscribed in the soil by the feet of those who daily patrol it, there is a diffuse zone, a zone lacking in discernment, a particularly hybrid zone, that goes by the name of Imagination.