Critic and historian Hal Foster, one of the most influential and prolific authors on modern and contemporary art, design, architecture, and postmodernism, talks to Electra about the status and function of critical theory in the current political juncture. He revisits the journey which has taken him from the radicalism of the New York intellectual milieu during the 1970s, to the preparation of an upcoming book around the popular idea of a ‘banal aesthetics’.

José Marmeleira, art critic and professor at the School of Arts and Design (Caldas da Rainha), writes about a recent book by Hal Foster, who is one of the most important critics and historians of North American art, a member of October magazine, and already interviewed in Electra (issue 22, Autumn 2023). This book questions the art-criticism binomial.

The encounter and the long-standing dialogue between the Italian critic and essayist Alfonso Berardinelli and the German poet, essayist and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger is an example of an elective affinity rich with ensuing consequences, such as a book by them both: Che noia la poetry. Pronto Soccorso per lettori stressati [What boring poetry. First Aid for stressed readers] (2006). This text by Berardinelli on the essayist Enzensberger prolongs this fruitful encounter.

The ‘Metropolitan’ section of this issue focuses on the relationship between hospitals and the city. Daniela Arnaut, an architect, university professor and researcher of ‘healthcare buildings’ and ‘healing spaces’, reveals a history that is often invisible because it is right in front of our eyes. As the pandemic rages, this essay encourages us to reflect on issues such as environmental hygiene, and asks whether we are witnessing a re-ordering of the urban space.

The writer Gonçalo M. Tavares and the artist-architect collective ‘Os Espacialistas’ [The Spacialists] devote themselves to the pursuit of utopian architectures. They put forward the concept of ‘human machines’, which do not work by necessity or routine but rather by the imagination of the body. This notion, which is distinctly present in the work of both, will be presented in the next two issues of Electra. With this work and this form of publication, we are inaugurating a new section in the magazine – ‘Serial’ – with which we return to the old editorial tradition of securing the readers’ loyalty with the thread of a story told over successive instalments.

In this issue, we publish the second instalment of three from the serial story ‘Human Machines’ by the writer Gonçalo M. Tavares and the group of artist-architects Os Espacialistas. These ‘human machines’ ‘create imaginary situations’, informing us, ‘When we fall asleep, all is not sleep or dreams’. They also speak of a God that ‘may be that which exists between the stones’.

This is the third and final instalment of Human Machines. Over three episodes, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Os Espacialistas created ‘imaginary situations’. ‘This simple machine,’ he says, ‘tries to mark the limits of a body’s shadow,’ before adding that ‘Only once does the Shadow Manipulation Machine collapse completely. This is in death. One suddenly loses one’s feet, one’s shadow, and the position of the old circumference of the world.’ This text is thus both strange and very familiar at the same time.

On the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust, in a new essay written for Electra, renowned specialist Jean-Marc Quaranta shows how the work of the great French writer and all the investigations he has generated force us to see his life through other eyes, changing the very literary status of the author. It is, therefore, an authentic and original ‘reincarnation’. Jean-Marc Quaranta is a university professor and member of the Proust team. He is the author of Un amour de Proust. Alfred Agostinelli (1888-1914) and it was he who prepared, established, presented and annotated the edition of the novel Le Temps Perdu, which constituted a first version of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, published for the very first time in 2021.

Abdellah Taïa is a Moroccan writer who has lived in Paris for twenty years. However, his vision of the Arab world, as he expresses it in his novels and in public, is not that of someone looking from a distance but of someone seeing from within. And on the basis of this meaningful familial and social experience of Morocco, he tries to destroy clichés, portraying a world that does not fit exactly with the way the West constructs it.

Jeremy Gilbert is an essayist, specialist in cultural and political theory and lecturer at the University of London. He is also a DJ. On the basis of this famously provocative quotation from Nietzsche, he tells us how matter can be mobile and creative. Linking oriental wisdom and western science, the ‘god that dances’ can be a good vantage point for looking at our times, these times of ‘great celebration’ everywhere, every hour and every minute, with their multiplicities and complexities.