The American photographer John Divola has prepared a set of unpublished works for this edition of Electra. They are part of an ongoing series located in an air force base in the California desert that was decommissioned after the Cold War came to an end, and which has since remained like a veritable city in ruins. It is not the first time that John Divola aesthetically intervenes in abandoned spaces and then captures the results on film. As Afonso Dias Ramos demonstrates in the following essay introducing Divola’s work, the visual explorations that have been undertaken during this pandemic actually take up the artistic strategies that had marked his early oeuvre, in a surprising throwback of nearly half a century that is also a revisitation of contemporary art history. The images shown in this «Scoop» foreground ruins as a way to reposition photography in direct interaction with painting, sculpture, and installation, and thereby declining any distinctions between the witness or the participant, between the intervention and the document.

Almost a decade after publishing 24/7, an acclaimed essay about how the contemporary economic system forces us to work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, abolishing the possibility of rest or even sleep, the US theorist Jonathan Crary talks to Electra about his newly-released book, Scorched Earth. This new work is an uncompromising analysis of how the digital era has failed to bring about the radical change that it once heralded, and instead revealed itself to be incompatible with the idea of a sustainable planet and of interdependence among human beings.

In this interview, Jorge Gaspar shows that his knowledge, as a geographer, of the Portuguese and European territory and of the various issues related to the countryside and the city extends to a literary and artistic culture. This gives his discourse the capacity to cross disciplinary borders, filling it with interesting and pertinent aspects.

The images in this portfolio, conceived by Jorge Queiroz for Electra, speak of the revelation and concealment that give them a sense of continuous discovery. A skilled draughtsman and an utterly original painter, the author of O Banho de Arquimedes [Archimedes bath] has had an uncompromising international career, which, unlike others, does not submit to facile and external dictates. With a gaze that encompasses the successive epochs of art history, Jorge Queiroz allows his oeuvre to build a personal contemporaneity that dialogues with the art movements which have shaped our modernity since the late 19th century. His art resorts to certain aspects of science to enact a prestidigitation in which formal imagination and material imagination shadow each other. This portfolio is presented by curator Antonia Gaeta, for whom ‘The oeuvre of Jorge Queiroz is steeped in the conviction that what is loved endures, and that the quest for light is in equal parts narration and portent’.

Donald Trump’s relationship with journalism and American journalists’ reciprocal relationship with Trump were more like a battlefield. They provided an important, even exhilarating chapter in the history of political journalism of our times, which have certainly been fraught with problematic deviations. Writing from different places, Carla Baptista, a lecturer at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a specialist in the history of the media and journalism, and Paulo Pena, a journalist from a multinational investigative journalism team (Investigate Europe) analyse and discuss these issues.

José Luis Pardo, one of Spain’s leading philosophers and essayists, argues that, in an age when it is plausible to ask whether the internet has given rise to a new public sphere, journalism has turned its back on its oldest social function. This jumps off the screen in political debates on TV, where it can be hard to distinguish between emotional pornography and politics.

Drawing on a famous quote from Flaubert’s correspondence, which served as Marguerite Yourcenar’s catalyst for Memoirs of Hadrian, Benedikt Eckhardt, a German historian, classics professor, and author of a vast and renowned body of work, clarifies what we currently know about a past that does not pass and resonates in our present.

To mark the centenary of Franz Kafka's death (b. 03.07.1883 – d. 03.06.1924), Electra is publishing three articles on the Czech writer: one by Gianluca Cuozzo, professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, on representations of bureaucracy and the exercise of power, or, to put it another way, everything that gave rise to the adjective ‘kafkaesque’, which has now come into common usage; another article by António Guerreiro centred on biographical issues, drawing on the monumental three-volume biography of Kafka by the German author Reiner Stach; and finally, an article by Jacques Le Rider, a French Germanist and renowned scholar of Central European literature and culture, who writes about Kafka's bilingualism, his relationship with the German and Czech languages, and the historical and linguistic background of Prague.

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.