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 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.

For Álvaro Siza, drawing is his pact with the world and with himself. This highly renowned architect, who received the Pritzker Prize in 1992 for his work in so many countries around the world, never ceases to draw what he sees and what he imagines: buildings, objects, bodies, faces, figures (frequently his own), animals, landscapes, visions, dreams and sentiments. His drawings see and open eyes. They listen and they scrutinise. They play and they have fun. They mention and they measure. They think and they meditate.

Several Lebanese artists volunteered their services during the war years and created camouflage military fatigues for the fighting militias. Their designs were catalogued in this book by Farid Sarroukh, a mediocre painter who was irked (but not surprised) by his colleagues’ eager collaboration with the militias.

In our time, memory, in its social and collective dimensions, has become a theme of public discussion, closely linked to violent, or even traumatic, historical events, from the Holocaust to 9/11. Today the possibility of turning memory into a literary device, like Proust, is reduced or even impossible: at this time individual memory, as a psychic mechanism, is confronted with its technological prostheses, e.g. smartphones, computers and the Internet, where all the memory in the world, which used to be represented in libraries and archives, is stored. Since memory and the manifestations of its hegemony (visible in the obsession with heritage, in the ceaseless inauguration of museums, and in the public agenda of celebrations and reflections) mark our time with a whiff of decadence, we devote to it ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra.

An essential task of our historical consciousness is to think about the time we live in, and to present it as a complex unity for which we have no name. The evident manifestations of the age and its less visible but distinctive traits are the topics of five texts that make up the special feature of this inaugural issue.

Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates. In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their established boundaries.

It was the time when the future was an ism. Technology was making a modern epic out of human labour. It was the time when Fernando Pessoa made this metallic exclamation in the paroxysmal, paradoxical, relentless voice of Álvaro de Campos in the opening words of the verbal spark called Triumphal Ode:

By the painful light of the factory’s huge electric lamps I write in a fever. I write gnashing my teeth, rabid for the beauty of all this, For this beauty completely unknown to the ancients.

O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r-r!

Often announced throughout the 20th century as the spectre of ‘technological unemployment’ grew, the end of work has become a common trope with the emergence of new digital technologies and the development of intelligent machines that replace humans in production. This article covers the numerous signs of the end of work (or employment, at least), mainly focusing on the contemporary debate about the ‘crisis of work’, which either acquires a utopian character or draws an apocalyptic scenario.

Work is one of the greatest issues of our time, an all-encompassing social fact and a world of paradoxes – there is both too much of it and not enough, at a time when artificial intelligence is replacing people and their jobs, while employees’ lives are increasingly diminished due to longer working hours and a loss of autonomy. The announcement of the end of work as we know it and the predictions of what has been termed a new ‘post-work’ society have not yet led to a suitable response at the political level nor in the customs and habits of the entire social system. However, the idea that it is necessary to reinvent work and how it is distributed to eliminate the increasingly relentless contrast between an elite and a huge mass of the unemployed, precariously employed, intermittently employed and temporarily employed is gaining ground. The current pandemic and its related circumstances have reinforced the idea of smart working and working from home, which, although operating within the framework and according to the rules of a system that has been dysfunctional for a long time, may be the beginning of a radical transformation. The issue of work, a diverse topic that covers many areas, is the ‘subject’ of this issue of Electra.