There are lives that are so secretive and elusive that they are always confused with the shock of their end. There are works that are so secret and inexhaustible that they are always heading for the surprise of their beginning.

Franz Kafka understood the forms and rules of the exercise of power in the contemporary world with particular lucidity; forms and rules in which violence is concealed, made acceptable because it is entrusted not to the executioner or to a repressive apparatus that makes a direct and threatening show of itself, but to the weapons of writing. 

The works shown here (pen & ink drawings, watercolours, paper collage, cut-outs), are from the North American artist Kara Walker’s personal collection – selected especially for this edition of Electra’s ‘Portfolio’, and introduced by Sofia Steinvorth. Walker is one of the most highly regarded contemporary artists working today, and has exhibited at several major galleries and museums including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tate Modern. For Walker, the past is as unknown and threatening as the future, and it is this that leads to the shadows and figures that we see in the present. Starting from questions of gender and identity, racism and violence, her art investigates their complexities and contradictions. Walker’s beautiful and disturbing works are illuminated illustrations in the great book of time, in which history is written and rewritten, with advances, retreats, obfuscations and revelations, ordered words and disordered images.

Furious, unexpected, satirical: Karl Kraus's aphorisms are an exemplary manifestation of early 20th century Viennese culture.

Raphaëlle Bacqué is a reknowned reporter for Le Monde newspaper and author of several books, including the acclaimed biography of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld Kaiser Karl. Drawing on a provocative quote from the great Chanel stylist, Bacqué offers us a fascinating portrait of the man who revealed so much in order to better hide himself.

Henning Lundkvist is a Swedish visual artist and writer who lives in the capital of Denmark. Taking Kharabat, ‘the last teahouse of its kind’, as his cue, the author draws an unexpected parallel between two very distant and very different cities: Copenhagen and Kabul. We are suddenly immersed in a world of sounds (including music), tastes, images and technologies in which a synaesthetic interweaving of times and spaces inspires us to travel, imagine and wander. This View of Delft thus becomes a moving painting in which the forms, figures and colours are haunted by the subterranean threat of the sea.

The writer and anthropologist Filip de Boeck has conducted extensive field research in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He describes the city of Kinshasa on the basis of two metaphorical elements: the hole and the mountain. The mountain metaphor is associated with its authoritarian, vigilant and ostensibly powerful colonial past. The hole metaphor refers to the post-colonial present of a megalopolis dominated by chaos and unable to offer its inhabitants the infrastructure they need for a decent life. The article is illustrated with photos by the photographer Sammy Baloji, who worked with the author on the project Suturing the City.
Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds (2016).

In this article, António Guerreiro covers the history of Kitsch and that ‘fatal attraction of intelligence to stupidity’ which leads politics to totalitarianism and reduces artistic values to evil, transferring aesthetics to the domain of ethics. Through the mass media, it has assumed an absolute preponderance over daily life by turning the market into a form of existence and giving entertainment a banal hegemony.

Electra challenged the highly-esteemed Brazilian writer, essayist and university lecturer, Silviano Santiago, to keep a diary for a period of time. In a serene and subtly disenchanted tone, he recorded certain points in his day-to-day life – actions, meetings, reflections, renewed visits to literary works – blending them with the tense political and cultural life of Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

The author of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Number (2020), Keith Hossak, a Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, explains something seemingly basic, but that is enormously complex for a layperson to comprehend: what is a number, what is counting, and how is the infinite quantity of numbers analogous to the mind of God, the supreme mathematician.