Lourdes Castro was born in 1930, in Funchal, Portugal, and her origins are present in her work like a watermark. She studied Painting at Lisbon’s School of Fine Arts (1950–1956). She lived in Munich for some time and, in 1958, she moved to Paris. In 1983, she went back to the island of Madeira, where she currently lives.

The Lourdes Castro exhibition at Musée régional d’art contemporain Occitanie in France was curated by Anne Bonnin. It was a revelation and was ‘greeted with amazement and enthusiasm’. This is what João Pinharanda tells us in his comments and critique. Starting from the exhibition and its itinerary, this curator and art historian opens up new perspectives in the way we look at such original, subtle, absorbing and fleeting work. Made of light and shadow, it seems to be suspended in space and time. Or rather, suspended between space and time. It is this eternity of the moment that makes its contemporaneity a fascinating visual enigma and an engaging poetic mystery.

Nick Srnicek, a Canadian professor at King’s College in London, is one of the authors of the Accelerate Manifesto and a book which imagines a post-capitalist world without work. Helen Hester is a founding member of a collective responsible for the book Xenofeminism. Written by both, this article focuses on a type of work that is generally neglected in political calculations and sociological research: the unpaid labour of social reproduction that consists of such activities as cleaning, caring and cooking.

She was born into great wealth but died destitute. Every day from birth until death belonged to her. She said that she wanted to turn herself into a work of art. Muse, patron and socialite; eccentric, excessive and extravagant; free, liberated and libertine, her life was a constant performance. She collected herself with the greed and obsession of frustrated collectors. She was painted, drawn, sculpted and photographed by dozens of artists. She multiplied her image to become someone else, which was the only way she could be herself. She threw the wildest parties, sported the most original dresses and wore the most shocking makeup. Her realm extended to houses and palaces in Milan, Rome, Venice, Capri, Paris and London. The ‘futurist marchioness’, as Marinetti called her, set trends and anticipated artistic and cultural attitudes in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The luxury of writing, writing of luxury, luxury as excess in relation to an economy of utility: it is along these lines that this article by Australian McKenzie Wark, professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the New School in New York, and author of A Hacker Manifesto and Love and Money, Sex and Death, unfolds.

The work of Magali Reus, a renowned contemporary artist nominated in 2018 for the prestigious Hepworth Prize, has been exhibited in leading galleries and museums. Born in Holland, she has lived in London for almost two decades. In this Portfolio, commissioned for Electra, the artist presents her photographic work for the first time. The images shown here are accompanied by an essay written especially by the American novelist, poet and curator, Andrew Durbin, editor of Frieze Magazine. He says: ‘I have always seen Reus’s work as an art of possible and impossible objects for possible and impossible places and people.’ He adds that the Portfolio is an invitation ‘not only to feel more, but to look closer’.

Rui Chafes, a sculptor, writes especially beautifully about the work of Manuel Rosa, another sculptor, on the subject of an anthological exhibition entitled Clareira, which marked the artist's return to public shows. Chafes says that his work is not of this fast, hurried world made of meteoric successions of superficial images and information that make us confound beauty with fleeting attraction, a pulse with a death rattle.

António Cabrita, a Portuguese writer who has been living in Maputo for almost two decades, casts a critical, sophisticated eye over the city. It is the lucid account of a lover who is quite aware of the merits and flaws of his beloved, and her evolution.

In 1928, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was twenty years old. She left Portugal to study art in Paris and, from France, visited Italy on a study trip. While on her travels to Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, Bologna, Florence and Pistoia, she made quick pencil drawings of what she saw in a sketchbook. At the same time, she wrote letters to her mother, in a complicit tone, about her impressions, discoveries and feelings. These drawings and letters, which establish an intimate and concordant dialogue between them, remained unpublished. They belonged to the artist’s personal legacy, which was later added to the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation collection. A selection of these words and images is revealed here by Electra constituting a very interesting record of the formative years of this great painter, who was born in Lisbon and lived in Paris, and whose masterful work is represented in the world’s most important museums and collections.

Maria Velho da Costa is a highly respected writer who has nonetheless remained in the background, impermeable to the processes and strategies used in the public construction of writers. Her works of narrative fiction are a milestone in the history of Portuguese literature of the last half-century. She combines a dash of experimentalism with the great points of reference of modern literature. Maria Velho da Costa's immense merit stands out in our literary landscape.