Robert Musil, author of The Man without Qualities, with his critical attitude of Viennese modernism, expressed huge scepticism about the idea of progress. Dario Gentili, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Roma Tre University, examines and comments on this idea.

Continuing his journey around the Mediterranean, André Príncipe visited Tunisia. In La Goulette, at the port of Tunis, in the 19th century called ‘la petite Sicile’, he attended a concert by Badiaa Bouhrizi, known by her stage name Neysatu. It is with this singer songwriter, author and composer, an activist for freedom and social justice, that the photographer and editor converses, on behalf of Electra, about politics, music, djinns and African identities. Words join images here in an interview that addresses some of the themes of our global contemporaneity.

‘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.

Jacques Lévy is a well-known urbanist and geographer and the author of a vast body of work (including books, movies, articles, etc.) with significant repercussion. His time is divided between being a university professor and editing the online magazine EspacesTemps.net. Lévy has received various awards, of which the Vautrin Lud Prize – the most prestigious prize in the field of geography – stands out. In this interview given to Sofia Steinvorth for Electra, he speaks about urbanism (its new tendencies and its relationship with politics), cities, people and their everyday lives, open societies, democracy and serendipity.

João Pedro Fróis, professor and researcher at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, writes about the exceedingly singular artist Jaime Fernandes (1899–1969), who was committed to the Bombarda Insane Asylum (later Miguel Bombarda Hospital) from 1938 until his death. Jaime’s drawings (in pen, biro or ink on paper) turned him into a remarkable representative of art brut, to whom filmmaker António Reis dedicated his 1974 eponymous film Jaime.

Widely considered to be the most renowned, dominant and feared literary critic of the last decades, James Wood discusses the different stages of an intellectual journey that has taken him from a religious education in Britain to the most prestigious positions in the American literary world, as a book critic for The New Yorker magazine, a professor at Harvard University, and the author of award-winning novels and essays. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, James Wood reflects on his life and work as a reader, critic, professor and writer.

Jean Starobinski, who died last March in Geneva, his hometown, has been described as the greatest literary critic of the 20th century. But ‘literary critic’ does not do justice to this man who held degrees in classical studies and medicine (he worked as a hospital intern for five years). He showed great insight in his analysis of the history of ideas, literature and art, and practiced thematic reading and interpretation like no other. The history and representations of melancholy recurrently appear in his work, as mentioned by António Guerreiro, whose text recovers part of an interview given by ‘Staro’, as his friends called him, during a conference in Porto in July, 1990. Author of a brilliant study on Rousseau, he left a lasting mark on 18th-century studies. It was mainly from that era’s soil and subsoil that he took the mask motif, which radiates throughout his work and attaches itself to his own face. This is shown by Barbara Chitussi, who continues here the interpretation of Starobinski’s work initiated in an essay entitled Jean Starobinski e la conoscibilità della maschera.

This testimony of a young high-school teacher on the outskirts of Paris speaks of a highly optimistic relationship with students that have been labelled problematic. Going against the most persistent stereotypes, she reveals how, unexpectedly, the students believe in the Republican values on which French schools are founded.
 

In this section, we show unpublished work by one of the most highly regarded photographers working today: Jo Ractliffe. This South African artist, whose career dates back thirty-five years, is included in the collections of some of the world’s major art institutions, such as MoMA and the Met (New York), the Tate Modern (London) and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam). To mark her new retrospective (Drives) at the renowned Art Institute of Chicago, we reveal some never before seen photos that Ractliffe took in Angola, shot at places such as the port of Luanda, the Boavista neighbourhood and the Roque Santeiro Market. What attracted her was to see ‘how people were making their way in this wild chaotic sprawl of a city, full of post-war energy and enterprise and the contradictory promise of a new future’. Afonso Dias Ramos presents this important contemporary artist and her work for Electra in an essay written especially for this issue.

This portfolio by João Penalva, an artist widely renowned for works that combine video, installation, photography, music, performance, text and image, showcases a number of unpublished pictures: a series of black-and-white photographs taken during his walks across London, in a way that visually resembles the painted canvases of Abstract Expressionism, as the art historian Afonso Dias Ramos comments in the accompanying essay.