On 26 November 2011, at 15:02 (UTC), a space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. After a journey of 560 million kilometres, it arrived on Mars at 05:17 on 6 August 2012, its mission to explore the planet and carry out scientific research. The probe’s name was Curiosity.

The writer, translator, critic and researcher Richard Zenith was born in the USA and has lived in Portugal for more than three decades. His exhaustive work on the writings of Fernando Pessoa has made him one of the world’s leading authorities on the great poet of heteronyms.

When he won the Pessoa Prize in 2012, Zenith said, ‘The most complicated part about writing a biography of Fernando Pessoa is finding a narrative thread. The essence of his life doesn’t consist of facts or events. It’s hard to write about a life that was spent above all in his head. Pessoa lived between this world and the next.’

The biography that Zenith has written is due for publication later this year. His work draws on long years of study dedicated to the legacy of this poetic genius, and on everything that he has discovered about him. As a book both about Pessoa and by Zenith, this monumental biography is eagerly awaited.

The pre-publication chapter presented in this issue of Electra anticipates and reveals the nature of Pessoa: A Biography. It combines meticulous sources with a knowledgeably subtle interpretation to create a narrative with a strong, fluid and fascinating thread that echoes the poet’s multiple voices and captures the movements of this magnificent machine of melancholy created by the person who once asked: ‘Why did I make my only life / A life made only of dreams?’

The pages here present a synthetic image of Pessoa: his physical appearance (‘the always well-dressed poet’), sources of income, family ties, social, intellectual and literary bonds, the clear enigma of his sexuality, the real and mythical Lisbon, and the complex relationship between his life and work.

Almost a decade ago, Zenith said of the future: ‘Only after finishing the biography of Pessoa, if it doesn’t finish with me first…’

The biography was eventually written, and its writer has survived. This triumph over death is also a victory for Fernando Pessoa. The poet lives on and will continue to do so; his life deserves to be told with inspiration, rigour and care, and this is precisely what Richard Zenith has done.

We look back at the 1920s from the 2020s and ask what happened then and what is happening now. Despite major changes, there are similarities that are not analogous but homologous (crises, pandemics, etc.). The American historian Bradley W. Hart, who received the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize in 2019, is a professor at California State University and an expert on this historical period, on which he has published several books. In this essay, he portrays an unstable, contradictory, perilous and fascinating decade when ‘there was no return to normality’ and anything seemed possible.

João Constâncio is an academic at the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Here he comments and extemporises on his personal interpretation of this phrase by Henry de Montherlant, and tries to show how it can be interpreted in the light of the ‘unreason’ that plagues our times.

Pedro Costa is an ‘auteur’, but to a far greater degree than that alluded to by the notion of ‘film d’auteur’. His films overflow with reality and are populated by people who emerge as exemplary figures of our age. Despite following his own unique and undefinable path, Costa has garnered international prestige and reputation as well as numerous international awards, and has greatly contributed to the spread of ‘Portuguese cinema’. This interview examines his work and everything it involves.

Estes dois textos sobre Lisboa desenvolvem temas tratados no âmbito do projecto «Fragmentação e Reconfiguração: A experiência da cidade entre arte e filosofia», em particular no programa de rádio «Ruas de Sentido Único», concebido por Maria Filomena Molder e os dois autores destes textos: Nuno Fonseca, que escreve sobre a paisagem sonora de Lisboa, e Nélio Conceição, que trata aqui das imagens e representações da cidade. Estes textos foram escritos pouco tempo antes de ser declarada a pandemia, que afectou significativamente o estado de coisas que eles descrevem, confirmando assim uma ideia presente no texto de Nuno Fonseca: a de que a paisagem sonora tem uma temporalidade dinâmica e uma historicidade.

This portfolio presents the work of an artist whose oeuvre expands (in and of itself) when exhibited, as only then does it become fully visible and properly challenged. For Heimo Zobernig, the most international of Austrian artists, painting, sculpture, film, video, performance, architectural models and design are multiple and at times contradictory modes of questioning and discovery. As the curator, Karola Kraus, notes in her essay on the artist, ‘Heimo Zobernig’s works encompass processes of art production and material aesthetics as well as issues of display and architecture, and question the mechanisms whereby museums and galleries function.’ For the portfolio section of Electra, Zobernig ‘selected the images focusing on installation shots from important exhibitions’, creating a continuum that comprises both his artistic work and exhibition practice.

Joaquim Pinto’s importance is not solely measured in the films that he has directed since 1988, alone or in collaboration with Nuno Leonel, or in those he has produced. He also introduced to Portuguese cinema a sound quality that had been sorely lacking. His artistic and technical trajectory is defined by the extreme experience of a body fighting against deadly invaders recounted in the intimate and self-reflexive tone of his latest film, which urges us to look beyond this portrait of the man, and the autobiographical material and work.

In this dossier, we examine curiosity, in its scientific, literary and artistic forms. We also trace the key moments in its history: from being regarded in the Middle Ages as a vice and a transgression deserving of moral and religious punishment to being considered a valuable faculty in the modern age (or even, as Hobbes classified it, one of many passions) that lies at the root of the search for knowledge and the new scientific spirit. While this theme occupies no obvious place in our times – when learning and information are driven by mechanisms beyond the desire for knowledge that defines curiosity – it raises trans-historical issues about knowledge, morality and religion. In this context, it is apposite to recall that the etymology of the word ‘curiosity’ stems from the Latin curare, thus encompassing a semantic field that relates to the idea of caring. Here, then, we take a careful look at several questions which curiosity raises.

‘Because there is a hidden story on every corner in Paris’. Thus ends this evocation of a city which, like no other, is built on space-time. In his article, the musician and writer Adolfo Luxúria Canibal mixes his own memories with more general ones. While his impressions do not ignore those of others, his personal experience of living in the city for five years lends them an authenticity. The vocalist of the band Mão Morta reminisces about this ‘cosmopolitan and parochial’ city, where living is an art form and reality is never disentangled from the imaginary, and the figure of Isidore Ducasse, the Count of Lautréamot, lurks like a luminescent shadow.

In this ‘Book of Hours’, the renowned South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son speaks of the present and the past in a gesture that joins the world through the musicians that come together to perform. The pandemic traverses this diary as a reminder of the risk it presents to our lives. The concert that the artist cancelled at the last minute is a symbol of frustrated disappointment that she hopes to transform into the joy of hope – the hope that live music, currently silenced, will be heard again one day.

At what point did we begin referring to education predominantly as an investment, love as a contract, family as a partnership, friendship as a network, and the future as a dividend? When did the naturalisation of this language occur, establishing a relationship to the world on the basis of a transaction according to which experience is defined by returns, and subjectivity by value? An indicator of this profound mutation can be found in the way the word speculation inscribed itself so vehemently and yet so banally in the contemporary imaginary. While current usage has reduced it to something commonplace due to its association with financial markets, deals and scams; the word still carries its centuries of muted meanings, when a speculator meant a mystical prophet, star gazer, mirror maker, or visionary artist. These are the forgotten declinations of the prime category of the era of financial capital, that which defines our political unconscious.