In the ‘Metropolitan’ section of this issue, the Italian architect Martino Tattara reflects on the way in which cities have responded to their housing crises. Analysing the relationship between property and housing, he recounts his experience of collective housing construction, as carried out by the architectural practice Dogma. In Berlin, Venice, London and Chicago, Tattara has taken part in the most important international forums of debate on the major challenges facing contemporary architecture and urban planning.

‘If the year 2020 had to choose to be a country, it would choose to be Serbia,’ we read in this intense and beautiful diary written in the Serbian capital at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has taken hold of everything. And from Belgrade we can see the world. Its author, Jelena Bogavac, is a stage director, playwright, writer, poet, performer and editor who actively participates in major international festivals on contemporary theatre. Based on her personal, family, artistic and intellectual experience, Jelena observes, thinks and concludes: ‘Life is passing us by right now. And after is not even close.’ ‘Huge fear is replaced with huge madness.’ In this diary, where she has put these ideas on paper, the days are so present they need no numbering. They are her days and those of her city – they are ours, too, and those of our places, and at times of no place at all.

A professor at prestigious universities – London and Harvard – and a world-renowned lawyer in the field of human rights, regularly working at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Philippe Sands is a leading authority on international law. In recent decades, he has been involved in the most important political and legal cases, from Pinochet’s arrest to Milosevic’s conviction. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, CNN and the BBC, as well as the author of the acclaimed book East West Street: on the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity. He also personwrote the BBC documentary What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy. In an exclusive interview for Electra, Philippe Sands talks to Afonso Dias Ramos about the contemporary world, what is wrong with it and what threatens it, legal actions against climate change, and what has altered as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Taking his book as the underlying thread, he also talks about his family roots, his life, his professional, civic and humanitarian work, and the causes he defends and has defended. An idealist-cum-realist, he talks about the future as something that is still undecided and depends upon us.

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…

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’.

Yves Michaud, a philosopher and art critic, and Salvatore Settis, an art historian and archaeologist, discuss a subject of great relevance today: the issue of returning artworks and ‘important objects’ to their original source. Taking the example of the marbles Lord Elgin removed from the Parthenon at the beginning of the 19th century, which are housed in the British Museum, Settis shows how there are many misconceptions and a long history that need to be known to realise what is in play in terms of the claims for repatriation; Michaud, looking at the issue from an anthropological viewpoint, demonstrates that these operations are hugely complex and that they often end up being used to back up a concept of museums as spaces for chauvinistic propaganda.

Calls for the restitution of artworks and ‘important pieces’ to their countries or communities of origin are extremely complex as the terms of the issue itself are problematic. I do not believe it is possible to formulate a universally valid general principle. Only a subtle case-by-case analysis is possible.

The first question is: what is to be returned?

Often, we think of the Acropolis in Athens as though it had always been the way it is now, or rather as if losing something of its original splendour had been a slow process, just the result of time passing. In the face of recurring claims by Greek governments for the return of the marbles that Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon to London (now in the British Museum) there are many who think that this was the only – or the most significant – sudden diminution of the perfect beauty of the Acropolis that Pericles built. This is not so. Throughout the centuries, the Acropolis has been assembled and disassembled like a cat’s cradle. It was Christianity that changed its appearance radically, turning the Parthenon into a church and installing the bishop in the Propylaea. The Parthenon was then much modified: the imposing ivory and gold statue of Athena was removed, the eastern main entrance was closed up and another one opened on the opposite side; an apse was constructed inside the cella and a wall was built to connect the external columns (something similar can still be seen today in Syracuse Cathedral, a temple contemporaneous with the Parthenon).

An exhibition by Pedro A.H. Paixão at Galeria 111 in Lisbon in the first half of 2020 is revisited here by the art critic José Marmeleira. In Aurora. Desenhos e Outros Materiais, this Milan-based artist creates work which is as consistent in its results as it is in the theoretical thought that underlies it, as it encounters the canonical genres of art history such as drawing and the portrait.

Taking as her starting point the exhibition Earthkeeping/Earthshaking – Arte, feminismos e ecologia, shown at Galeria Quadrum in Lisbon, the curator and researcher Margarida Mendes writes about the cultural themes and ethics it deals with artistically and which lie at the heart of contemporary debates.