The problem is not just that the book is over thirty years old and there is not a single Portuguese translation available. This case is not unique, but it is harder to understand that even in such an intellectually dynamic country as Brazil, the book is not for sale in some niche publisher or university press. As I was saying, the problem is that this thesis, published by the economist Edward S. Herman and the linguist Noam Chomsky in 1988, that the media depends on a political economy that strives to manufacture consent, is the last great critical contribution to a topic where criticism runs rampant.

Moisés Puente, the Spanish author and publisher, analyses a phenomenon of our times, a phenomenon of great importance that has not always been acknowledged: ‘contrary to that which was championed by figures such as Peter Eisenman during the 1990s, architecture is no longer read as a text but is presented as an image’. This change had many effects, such as the transfer of authorship of images from the architect to the photographer of architecture. Puente quotes the example of the well-known Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. When presenting their work at the Fifth Venice Biennale, they decided to exhibit nothing but photographs by four photographic artists. In this brave new world, images of the city and the city of images are the same and appear in representations that are becoming more and more abstract and closer to non-places.

The Mexican writer Octavio Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. A great poet, essayist and critic, he is the author of a work that seems to have everything: literature and linguistics, philosophy and history, politics and geopolitics, psychology and sociology, anthropology and the visual arts. He believes that culture reveals this world and creates other worlds. Paz’s writings about art and artists are abundant and very original. The words in them seek images and the images find words. Juan Manuel Bonet analyses them in this essay written for Electra, conducting an inventory and proving himself to be ‘as precise as a geometrician and as lucid as a poet’. This is how he shows us a less-known side of Paz. Bonet is one of the most prominent Spanish intellectuals: poet, essayist, art critic, curator. He has been the director of Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderna (IVAM), Reina Sofía Museum and Instituto Cervantes. He has published well-known works, including the monumental Diccionario de las vanguardias en España (1907–1936).

Photographer Viviane Sassen has prepared a set of recent, unpublished works for this edition of Electra. They simultaneously show what has made her stand out as an artist throughout her career and the current phase of her visual creations. In an essay presenting her work, the curator and writer Josseline Black says: ‘The merging of the fashion and fine art photography worlds has been achieved by few, and Sassen is at the forefront of this movement, to the delicate extent that she eschews categorisation.’ Black underscores the influence of surrealism on the artist and the photographs shown in this Portfolio. She points out, ‘One of the outstanding qualities of these photographs is that they need no description, and in this sense their worldliness is otherworldly. We return to attuning with the idea of “looking the world in the face”, making eye contact with what is before oneself. The fine and almost totemic play between photography and painting in these images is also a testament to the gentle undoing of expectation.’

Rui Manuel Amaral, a writer from Porto, describes and analyses the ‘problem’ — i.e. the problematic — of his city, based on a number of symptoms that he examines with his literarily trained eye. And what he sees are the illusory representations cultivated by its citizens, the real city and the imaginary city, the objectivised Porto and the beautiful phantasmagoria that feeds it in its narcissism.

A recent exhibition of works by Gaëtan (1944–2019) in Lisbon, prompted Gillian Sneed to write about this collection made up of serially obsessive self-portraits. They attest to all the ways that a person can look at oneself, and range from tragic realisation of the passage of time to a sad, ironic smile at this fugue-loss. Sneed is a writer and art historian who specialises in contemporary art. She has lectured at City College New York and MoMA. In her critique, she says: ‘Though critical methodologies informed by queer theory are perhaps new in Portuguese art discourse, I would like to suggest that Gaëtan’s work provides an apt opportunity to explore this mode of visual analysis.’

The general theme chosen by the curator, architect Hashim Sarkis, for the International Architecture Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia 2021 is How will we live together? With the pandemic all around us, the event raises questions about our future living conditions in a world that is increasingly divided and unequal. The exhibition also shows how the curator’s work has turned into an instrument capable of shaking the Biennale to its core. Curator, historian and critic Julia Albani was in Venice and has sent Electra a report of what she saw and how she saw what she saw.

The recent publication of the Portuguese edition of Hölderlin’s complete poems – Todos os Poemas – translated by João Barrento is the culmination of an exceptional undertaking. Literary critic João Oliveira Duarte reviews the significance of Hölderlin’s works, which had an extensive and multilayered reception throughout the twentieth century.

Bazooka is a playful word. When I was eight years old, and bought treats with the spare change my mother gave me to take to school, Bazooka was a piece of chewing gum for blowing bubbles which burst explosively. Derived from ‘bazoo’, slang for bluster, the word was created to name a wind instrument invented in America in 1910 by Bob Burns, a jazz musician and radio comedian. It spread into popular use during the Second World War as the name of an anti-tank gun used by the American army, whose tubular shape with a small bulging end was reminiscent of the instrument of the same name.

You hear it and you immediately want to sing along. You want to sing even though you’re tone deaf and you’re not singing out loud: just silently and to yourself. The Catalogue Aria and the opera in which it features – Don Giovanni, with music by Mozart and libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte – are high points in the history of the musical theatre genre, which first appeared in Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Even in the present day there are numerous variations that surprise and delight.