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.

The ‘Anthropocene event’ has put geology and a few geologists centre stage, but conflicts arose within this scientific realm that sometimes had little to do with science. The geologist and palaeontologist Jan Zalasiewicz, emeritus professor at the University of Leicester, interviewed here, is a well‑known scientist. Responding to the decision made by a subcommission of the International Union of Geological Sciences, he made the point that, based on current research, there is undisputable scientific evidence that supports the concept that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch. The atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen called this epoch the ‘Anthropocene’.

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.

Joaquim Pinto’s importance is not solely measured in the films that he has directed since 1988, alone or in collaboration with Nuno Leonel, or in those he has produced. He also introduced to Portuguese cinema a sound quality that had been sorely lacking. His artistic and technical trajectory is defined by the extreme experience of a body fighting against deadly invaders recounted in the intimate and self-reflexive tone of his latest film, which urges us to look beyond this portrait of the man, and the autobiographical material and work.

Jocelyne Saab was a French-Lebanese filmmaker, active from 1970 to 2019. Since she died on January 7th, 2019, her work has been (re)discovered by the younger generation of Lebanese, Arab and international filmmakers that claim their affiliation with this audacious form of political cinema. A witness of her time, Jocelyne Saab made films that wrote another history of the last 30 years of the 20th century in the Middle East.