A retrospective and comprehensive look on contemporary cinematographic production in Portugal, by an attentive French viewer and scholar. The national and international diffusion of Portuguese cinema and its self-representations owe much to these visions coming from abroad.

Golgona Anghel writes poetry in Portuguese, teaches Literature at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the University of Lisbon and, like Cioran, was born in Romania. On the subject of poetry and poets, she interprets and comments the ‘bitter’ sentence, as were most of this writer’s sentences.

Any political history of football is bound to be full of memorable events, geopolitical contingencies and ideological manifestations, and of names and personalities that have become cult figures, full of aspirations and world visions. This is the core of what the historian José Neves writes about.

"It was my turn to repaint a new image of some of the masterpieces of the Prado Museum through photography. As I have been using the technique of double or multiple exposures on analogue film for years, I considered it a fitting formula to build my imagery." In his descriptive memoire written for Electra about this work, the renowned photographer Alberto García-Alix, a Spanish National Photography Award winner, tells us about his relationship with the Prado, which began as a child when he was taken there by his mother, and talks about the method he used to create photographs based on the Museum’s artworks. Some of these previously unseen photographs are presented in the ‘Scoop’ section of this issue. They show how images can give continuity to other images in a way that veils them as much as it reveals them, in a journey to a world which is recognisable one moment and unrecognisable the next.

Quoting four passages and using them as four separate starting points – an excerpt from a Borges tale, another from Frances A. Yates’ The Art of Memory, Rimbaud’s poem ‘Voyelles’, and a series of excerpts from St Augustine’s Confessions – Maria Filomena Molder follows a winding path through the question of the force of memory and the forms and instruments of mnemotechnics.

The word ‘architecture’ is used in English, but speaks ancient Greek (and later learned Latin), since it is there that it finds the origins and foundations of the two terms that compose it etymologically: arkhé (chief, master) and tékhton (construction, builder, worker). In this way, we can conclude that in the word ‘architecture’ there is the sense of directing workers (many today would say: lead) and that the architect is the one who directs (leads) them.

This article was written by a scientist, an astrophysicist who also inhabits the realms of philosophy. Its starting point is the hypothesis that the world has died, in the sense that a ‘transcendental commonality’, which the idea of a cosmos assumes, has already been lost. According to this hypothesis, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is a factor of this cosmocide that makes the question about the ‘post-Covid-19’ world inapt.

In the first few months of 2022, celebrations marking the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth have proliferated: universities, cultural centres, periodicals, libraries, radio programmes, museums, local authorities, publishers and film producers have been honouring the artist with conferences, special initiatives, talks, exhibitions, film viewings, debates, documentaries and a great many new publications. And this is all taking place not only in Italy but in other countries as well. There is perhaps no other Italian writer who has been so amply commemorated apart from Dante, whose death seven hundred years ago was marked in 2021. However, what is striking is not only the number of initiatives dedicated to Pasolini, but the enthusiasm with which they have been received. How can this be explained?

Contemporary design culture and criticism in a book of essays with a title that serves as a programme.

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.