With Europe at war and fascist regimes in the ascendant, the Portuguese World Exhibition held in Lisbon in 1940 was the New State’s greatest propaganda event. It exalted the political and cultural symbols and the ideological underpinnings – predominantly nationalism, Catholicism and colonialism – of Salazar’s authoritarian regime. Using art and culture as instruments of prestige and seduction, its purpose was to create an imperial imaginary and a providential and civilising myth for the Portuguese nation. Under the aegis of the commemoration of the Double Centenary, history was co-opted to create a grand backdrop. Today, from a distance of eighty years, this major ideological and cultural event, which also comprised a ‘large album of images’, presents a historical memory that is far from neutral or passive, as the historian and researcher Júlia Leitão explains.

The friendship between sociologist Gilberto Freyre and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda found a correlation in the books in which each attempted to idealise a Brazil based on the notion of the tropics and Portuguese exceptionalism: Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933) and Raízes do Brasil (1936), respectively. At a later date, however, the latter completely departs from that approach to the Brazilian space and, with the notion of border, enters an enduring rivalry with his friend. It is to this divergence of views that we owe two distinct visions of Brazil, which are analysed and contrasted here by Luiz Feldman, a Brazilian diplomat.

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.

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.

This is the third and final instalment of Human Machines. Over three episodes, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Os Espacialistas created ‘imaginary situations’. ‘This simple machine,’ he says, ‘tries to mark the limits of a body’s shadow,’ before adding that ‘Only once does the Shadow Manipulation Machine collapse completely. This is in death. One suddenly loses one’s feet, one’s shadow, and the position of the old circumference of the world.’ This text is thus both strange and very familiar at the same time.

For some time now in Portugal, the word super has been used and abused as a form of emphasis and overstatement. Rightly or not, individuals from certain social and professional groups employ it as a suffix, noun or adjective, augmenting what is being said and, as a consequence, themselves. It can be likened to the urge to exclaim about everything: ‘It’s great!’ This optimistic desire to hyperbolise the world is an interesting symptom that is important to note. The author of this entry of the ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’ moves on to discuss the semantics of the word super.

On 26 November 2011, at 15:02 (UTC), a space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. After a journey of 560 million kilometres, it arrived on Mars at 05:17 on 6 August 2012, its mission to explore the planet and carry out scientific research. The probe’s name was Curiosity.

In this dossier, we examine curiosity, in its scientific, literary and artistic forms. We also trace the key moments in its history: from being regarded in the Middle Ages as a vice and a transgression deserving of moral and religious punishment to being considered a valuable faculty in the modern age (or even, as Hobbes classified it, one of many passions) that lies at the root of the search for knowledge and the new scientific spirit. While this theme occupies no obvious place in our times – when learning and information are driven by mechanisms beyond the desire for knowledge that defines curiosity – it raises trans-historical issues about knowledge, morality and religion. In this context, it is apposite to recall that the etymology of the word ‘curiosity’ stems from the Latin curare, thus encompassing a semantic field that relates to the idea of caring. Here, then, we take a careful look at several questions which curiosity raises.

The writer, translator, critic and researcher Richard Zenith was born in the USA and has lived in Portugal for more than three decades. His exhaustive work on the writings of Fernando Pessoa has made him one of the world’s leading authorities on the great poet of heteronyms.

When he won the Pessoa Prize in 2012, Zenith said, ‘The most complicated part about writing a biography of Fernando Pessoa is finding a narrative thread. The essence of his life doesn’t consist of facts or events. It’s hard to write about a life that was spent above all in his head. Pessoa lived between this world and the next.’

The biography that Zenith has written is due for publication later this year. His work draws on long years of study dedicated to the legacy of this poetic genius, and on everything that he has discovered about him. As a book both about Pessoa and by Zenith, this monumental biography is eagerly awaited.

The pre-publication chapter presented in this issue of Electra anticipates and reveals the nature of Pessoa: A Biography. It combines meticulous sources with a knowledgeably subtle interpretation to create a narrative with a strong, fluid and fascinating thread that echoes the poet’s multiple voices and captures the movements of this magnificent machine of melancholy created by the person who once asked: ‘Why did I make my only life / A life made only of dreams?’

The pages here present a synthetic image of Pessoa: his physical appearance (‘the always well-dressed poet’), sources of income, family ties, social, intellectual and literary bonds, the clear enigma of his sexuality, the real and mythical Lisbon, and the complex relationship between his life and work.

Almost a decade ago, Zenith said of the future: ‘Only after finishing the biography of Pessoa, if it doesn’t finish with me first…’

The biography was eventually written, and its writer has survived. This triumph over death is also a victory for Fernando Pessoa. The poet lives on and will continue to do so; his life deserves to be told with inspiration, rigour and care, and this is precisely what Richard Zenith has done.

João Constâncio is an academic at the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Here he comments and extemporises on his personal interpretation of this phrase by Henry de Montherlant, and tries to show how it can be interpreted in the light of the ‘unreason’ that plagues our times.