The Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, an eminent figure in post-colonial and ‘subaltern studies’, author of Provincializing Europe – a book that has had widespread international repercussions, and currently a professor at the University of Chicago, is interviewed by the historians José Neves and Marcos Cardão.

Money is at the same time the clearest thing and the most difficult to understand. This paradox is set out by Anselm Jappe, the author, among other works, of La société autophage (2017), which shows us where this problem comes from. As a commodity, money has become the supreme commodity, the only commodity, the ultimate fetish, and the cause of a completely irrational order, capable of producing unprecedented catastrophes, like that of 2008.

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) and Dora Maar (1901–1997), two women and two artists. In their time, the fact that they were women severely hindered their careers as artists. For that reason, today it is impossible to look at their work without considering what restricted, governed and limited them. The retrospectives presented in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay and Centre Pompidou showcase this work, which was interwoven with the artists’ lives, where the potential and risk they represented had to be conquered. This is what the historian, researcher and curator Helena de Freitas tells us, with critical and perceptive intelligence. Her words are infused with the proud and courageous melancholy with which these artists affirmed themselves in a world that denied them.

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.

A brief sentence written by Jules Michelet in 1929, both enigmatic and evident, has lent itself to many glosses and interpretations: Chaque époque rêve la suivante. It is a thought-provoking phrase, to which one delights in responding — with Walter Benjamin in sight.

Edmund de Waal is a contemporary artist, ceramicist and writer, whose book The Hare with Amber Eyes has been translated into many languages and hailed as a great literary and publishing success. His most recent exhibition, psalm, opened in Venice this summer to coincide with the Biennale Arte 2019. He came up with a portfolio for this edition of Electra, in which photographs of the exhibition are part of a poetic diary that recounts an inner and outer journey. This manuscript is full of themes from this writer-artist: memories, books, objects, senses and places. We see what we hear and hear what we see, because the words and images are the two sides of the coin with which we buy the world. ‘We are always from somewhere else,’ quotes de Waal. This is why we are all travellers and it is our journey that designs the space and the time with which we create our world.

In this interview, the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura looks back at his achievements, and at the key times and places in his career. He also reflects on the state of the profession and the conditions and contingencies architects experience, their social responsibility and the moral and aesthetic harm they can do, leaving their mark very visibly on the country.

Known as the ‘the father of public relations’, this innocent title dodges what many accuse him of – being the father of the manipulation of the masses and the inventor of marketing and modern propaganda. The Austro-American Edward L. Bernays, a double nephew of Sigmund Freud, was a pioneering spin doctor who lived an interesting 103-year-long life (1891–1995). Highly effective but contemptuous of the people he targeted, in equal measure, he created theories and practices to guide them and to make them do whatever those who paid him wanted. He knew how to create desires and needs, instigate campaigns (often nefarious) and controversy, start new fashions and habits, spur love and hate, and create illusions and deceptions. He shook individual beliefs and the collective imagination. He believed that you should make someone beg to be sold a product rather than beg them to buy it. His published books do not hide his ‘Machiavellian’ plans for de facto power and psychological control. From national and international political conspiracies to financial and commercial plots, he applied himself to everything with diabolical resourcefulness and astute cynicism, making himself indispensable to those who hired him. He was considered by Time magazine to be one of the hundred most influential Americans of the 20th century. Michael Molnar, a historian of psychoanalysis, researcher, and former director of the Freud Museum, provides a profile of Edward L. Bernays, whose ideas and methods are so visible in the world today. There are even some who suggest that his books may sit on the bedside tables of many of our current leaders…

A contemporary of Fernando Pessoa, Konstantinos Cavafy is one of the greatest, most translated and most quoted poets of the 20th century. In his work, full of melancholic solemnity, desire and escape, pleasure and memory, gravity and lightness, beauty and poverty, biography and history, past and present meet and illuminate each other in poems that combine simplicity and rigour with ‘that ardent fervour of a Greek summer afternoon’, as his French translator Marguerite Yourcenar put it. From the obscurity of a routine and anonymous life, Cavafy extracted gold which was purer than the air over the Sea of Alexandria. Greek Nikos Pratsinis, who, together with poet Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, translated Cavafy’s work into Portuguese, portrays the poet and his poetry for Electra in eight key questions.

This interview is with Elisabeth Lebovici, a historian and art critic (in Libération newspaper and Art Press magazine, among others) and the author of important studies on contemporary artists. The conversation focuses on her book about the effect of AIDS on the art world: Ce que le sida m’a fait (2017), which won the Pierre Daix Award. As the title indicates, it is a hands-on account. In the 1980s and 1990s Lebovici joined highly active groups in the fight against the invisibility and extremely negative representations of HIV-positive people. And now her book tells all about the dread of the disease and its effects.