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.
 

In this interview, renowned psychoanalyst, essayist and historian Élisabeth Roudinesco speaks about the inflation of ‘identity politics’, which steered social figurations and behaviours towards narcissism and ultimately led to an abandonment of past emancipatory ideals.

Emmanuel Todd encompasses several disciplines and fields of learning: his vast output is notable for its ambitious range and the originality of his viewpoints and ideas, which have consistently sparked both interest and controversy. Referencing Todd’s books, Bernardo Futscher Pereira provides a portrait of a thinker who looks at geopolitics and the timespan of human history and dares to answer the question: where are we?

In the stock market of feelings, the price of empathy has risen significantly while sympathy is practically junk now – nobody invests in it anymore.

The theme of this issue of Electra addresses a fundamental feature of our times: there is an empire of numbers in every corner of society and politics that briefs governmental managerial decisions, economic measures, cultural programmes, educational guidelines, and scientific research directives. In short: everything around us is inescapably informed by numbers.