This interview with Alfonso Berardinelli, the most important Italian literary and cultural critic, who has been active for more than half a century, is not only an approach to the critical-theoretical ideas of this ‘invisible writer’, but also a cultural diagnosis of our time.

When it comes to the world of design – what it is, what it represents, and what it is for – Alice Rawsthorn is one of its most internationally respected voices, with a global reach across social networks and debating forums. She has been a critic and columnist for some of the most influential newspapers and journals of our times including the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of classics such as the widely acclaimed Design as an Attitude. In this exclusive interview for Electra given to design curator and critic Vera Sacchetti, Alice Rawsthorn talks about her life and works, and outlines her views of the world and the future, showing in the process her overarching optimism in the face of the challenges and risks involved, and defending design as an ‘omnipresent force’ and ‘agent of change’.

Curatorship as an extensive project, both in the type of ‘events’ that it performs and in its intervention strategies, opens art up to fictions and potential times, against the obsession with the present in which the contemporary world is immersed. This is what moves Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quirós, whose work inhabits the intersection of art with theory and research.

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.

A retrospective of the work of Álvaro Lapa at the Serralves Museum showed us very clearly a complex and unique artist in the landscape of 20^th-century Portuguese art — an artist establishing a dense, productive dialogue with other disciplinary fields such as literature and philosophy. Reason enough for two different critical approaches: one by José Gil, the other by João Pinharanda.

Who was Kafka? Who was that man who had a vast, monstruous world inside his head and whose life was an ascesis in literature and for literature? The mystery called ‘Kafka’ is covered by the thick layer of a banal daily life as an employee of an insurance company, but he was in fact ‘made of literature’, incapable of being anything else. Since then, a succession of interpreters has tried to decipher the enigma, assuming it carries the form of an inner abyss. Before anyone else, Walter Benjamin said that the Czech writer did everything in his power to make the answer to the question of his identity inaccessible: ‘It is as if [Kafka] had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.’

The sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago, a northern Italian who moved to Palermo several years ago, provides a portrait of this Baroque city where so many other historical eras overlap, revealing that its reality lies far beyond the clichés and prejudices it arouses. Palermo is revealed here as the very essence of Sicily, and Sicily as the radiant centre of Italian literature.

This ‘View of Delft’ seems like a film set in Seville during the famous Holy Week. As the author, Marta G. Franco, a specialist in contemporary communication, tells us: there are 'seventy-two processions, from Friday of Sorrows until Easter Sunday, because Semana Santa in Seville is excessive even in the number of days it lasts.' As we read, through the text we are able to see the processions and everything that happens around them. These rituals, which fulfil age-old traditions, at the same time make use of the latest resources such as new technologies. As Marta G. Franco reminds us they are all participating in a work of street theatre, each with a role.

Ângela Ferreira was a pioneer in bringing to contemporary art topics and themes that are now omnipresent and are driving cultural debate. Having spent over thirty years researching the colonial past, the postcolonial present and the future on the horizon, her art has a consistency and coherence that has achieved national and international recognition. In this issue of Electra, Ângela Ferreira presents paintings made for future memories, based on murals shown at previous exhibitions. In the introductory essay for this portfolio, the curator and art historian Nomusa Makhubu writes, ʻI am drawn to the affective Ângela Ferreira Pan African Unity Mural I-X resonance enlivened by interlaced narratives [...in the Pan African Unity Mural...] re-sounding histories of exile, loss, struggle and defiance [...and also of optimism and hope...]. It is akin to what Tina Campt calls “affective frequencies”. To see what we don’t see, to pay attention to the resonances between each image and object, is to experience how “sublimely quiet images enunciate an aspirational politics”ʼ. The images that Ângela Ferreira shows here are thus a place in which visibility, inclusion and centrality are restored to those who have long inhabited the invisible peripheries of amnesia, exclusion and ignorance.

The focus on animals (and animality), as well as the idea that humans have duties towards them and that it is intolerable to treat them as ‘things’ and deny them the faculty of feeling and suffering, has become one of the great issues of our time. It is present not only in civic movements that are highly active in the public sphere, but also in the social and human sciences, where an important field dealing with animals has emerged. Ethics, politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy: today these disciplines are mobilised in an extensive operation that rescues animals from the silence to which philosophical thought – but not literature or art – has condemned them. The articles presented here deal with this type of reflection, in an interdisciplinary approach.