To think about the media and journalism today is to think about a world that is changing every day much more than the world itself. And it is to think about it in the certainty of uncertainty.

These days, when all powers are threatening each other like ferocious mythological animals and devouring each other in their love, the Fourth Estate or, in a more radical idealistic version, the acclaimed “counter-power”, has talked a lot about what it expected to happen and very little about what has been happening to itself.

A recent exhibition of works by Gaëtan (1944–2019) in Lisbon, prompted Gillian Sneed to write about this collection made up of serially obsessive self-portraits. They attest to all the ways that a person can look at oneself, and range from tragic realisation of the passage of time to a sad, ironic smile at this fugue-loss. Sneed is a writer and art historian who specialises in contemporary art. She has lectured at City College New York and MoMA. In her critique, she says: ‘Though critical methodologies informed by queer theory are perhaps new in Portuguese art discourse, I would like to suggest that Gaëtan’s work provides an apt opportunity to explore this mode of visual analysis.’

The interview with Yves Cabannes that we publish here focuses on a concept that is already one hundred and twenty years old, but that is of renewed current interest as a result of both the pandemic and climate change: the concept of the ‘garden city’. As an urban planning specialist, he has contributed to the reactivation of this concept, in particular through a manifesto in favour of 21st century garden cities, which he published in 2014 with Philip Ross.

Written by a renowned sport sociologist and consultant to several institutions, such as the Football Museum, in São Paulo, this article examines the social-racial divide between various Brazilian football teams. Overviewing several aspects of the mythology of football in Brazil, José Paulo Florenzano focuses specifically on the case of Garrincha, the ‘bow-legged angel’.

Beginnings still exist. Electra began a year ago and since then we have published five issues of this magazine dedicated to thought, art, literature, science and cul-tural criticism. Each one is a stroke that gradually draws the full face. This face is moveable and mutable, made of positions and oppositions, juxtapositions and superimpositions. It reveals itself in plural planes and variable geometries. It has diverse and complementary points of view. The more it changes and moves, the more it defines and affirms itself.

The work of the Italian sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago includes a contentious book entitled Genocidi animali (2018). Written with two friends, Massimo Filippi and Antonio Volpe, the slim volume caused controversy for using the word ‘genocide’. This article, beginning with a biographical narrative, looks at the “history of philosophers’ indifference towards the animal world”.
 
 

The Picoas Tower, designed by architects Patrícia Barbas and Diogo Seixas Lopes, demands the resumption of an insistent debate on the history of skyscrapers, their problematic relationship with the city, and what they represent in urban policies.

Ever since her childhood and throughout her near century-long life, the great American painter Georgia O'Keeffe turned the way she dressed her body into an affirmation of herself, both as a woman and a modern artist. She used the same originality and stylistic imagination to create her wardrobe as she used to create her paintings, leaving us a corpus of dresses of her own design or choice. A knowledge of these is fundamental to understanding the artist in her various dimensions, and her time in its various transformations and ruptures. ‘Her meticulous choice of clothes and the way she posed prove that she clearly knew the image she wanted to project and immortalise’ says the author of this essay, Anabela Becho, fashion historian, curator and researcher.

Afonso Dias Ramos writes about the recent release in France of an unpublished course on the relationship between painting and philosophy given by Gilles Deleuze in 1981, after moving to the University of Saint-Denis. This is an editorial milestone, rendering available to the public the French philosopher’s legendary weekly lectures from 1970 to 1987, which, up until now, had only been shared as audio recordings.

Recognised worldwide and represented in the most important art collections, the Italian artist Giorgio Griffa has selected a representative series of his recent works for this Portfolio section of Electra. Considered one of the most radical, eloquent and effective artists of our time, his work, which is already of historical importance, evidences a poetics that combines an original concept of art, an open personal language and a subtle precision of artistic practice. In an essay written for this edition, Francesco Manacorda, an Italian curator who lives and works in London, presents Griffa's work and reflects on the creative process, deciphering its rich cultural significance. Manacorda's text analyses the ‘fine group assembled here for Electra magazine’.