Pedro Costa is an ‘auteur’, but to a far greater degree than that alluded to by the notion of ‘film d’auteur’. His films overflow with reality and are populated by people who emerge as exemplary figures of our age. Despite following his own unique and undefinable path, Costa has garnered international prestige and reputation as well as numerous international awards, and has greatly contributed to the spread of ‘Portuguese cinema’. This interview examines his work and everything it involves.

In this essay, the Swiss researcher and architect Isabella Pasqualini looks at urban areas in search of her own space, where technology finds the subjectivity it needs to generate new objectivities. This intellectual and sensorial, individual and gregarious, real and virtual experience is part of the genealogy of geographic utopias, cultural mythologies and imaginary architectures of people who have designed ideal cities. Seen in this mobile, mutable light, the urban space turns into a stage for successive and simultaneous performances, a place of continuous creation that creates those who create it. This is why the people that live it are truly those who live in it.

Philippe Descola, who had Claude Lévi-Strauss as a superior and completed his PhD under his wing, has been a central figure of Anthropology since he published Par-delà nature et culture [Beyond Nature and Culture]. The thesis developed in this book had, and continues to have, tremendous resonance beyond its disciplinary field. The new times, characterised by the criticism of European ethnocentrism, are favourable to the triumphant reception of his work.

A professor at prestigious universities – London and Harvard – and a world-renowned lawyer in the field of human rights, regularly working at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Philippe Sands is a leading authority on international law. In recent decades, he has been involved in the most important political and legal cases, from Pinochet’s arrest to Milosevic’s conviction. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, CNN and the BBC, as well as the author of the acclaimed book East West Street: on the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity. He also personwrote the BBC documentary What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy. In an exclusive interview for Electra, Philippe Sands talks to Afonso Dias Ramos about the contemporary world, what is wrong with it and what threatens it, legal actions against climate change, and what has altered as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Taking his book as the underlying thread, he also talks about his family roots, his life, his professional, civic and humanitarian work, and the causes he defends and has defended. An idealist-cum-realist, he talks about the future as something that is still undecided and depends upon us.

Bernd Stiegler is an important media theorist and historian, and the author of various books on photography; he teaches at the University of Constanz. In this text, he traces the history of a progressive twentieth-century rediscovery: doomed to oblivion until quite late on, photography has now become a cultural good, and the conservation of photographic heritage has become an obligation.

Among all the forms of tourism, some of which are invented with a degree of imagination, none is as suitable for ideological analysis as so-called ethical tourism, for which a new word, 'voluntourism' has even been coined. Here is a considerable four-handed contribution that transcends disciplinary bounds and offers an ideological critique of ethical tourism.

In the history of the ‘+’ sign (addition), which was introduced, just like the ‘−’ sign (subtraction), in arithmetic writing to simplify accounting, Belgian philosopher Laurent de Sutter finds the cipher of excess, in a philosophical sense as well as an arithmetical one.

This centenary, at least in Italy, was full of surprises. For several years and as recently as just last year, the entire debate around Pasolini, with very few exceptions, seemed to be limited to an examination of the homophobic or political causes behind his violent death. The question of it being a poet who had been murdered was not considered at all, not least because there was widespread doubt as to whether Pasolini had actually been a poet at all. Today, however, the chorus is unanimous: it was a poet who died on the beach at Ostia, just a stone’s throw from Rome. Pasolini was a poet not only when composing his verses, but also when writing his novels, from Ragazzi di vita to Petrolio;a poet when preparing texts for the theatre or directing his films; a poet when claiming on the pages of Corriere della sera that he knew the names of those who had instigated massacres that had spilled so much blood in Italy, but that he could not divulge them for lack of proof.

Manuel Gusmão performs an untimely exercise in this book. He includes in his poetry a strong political, interventional and militant dimension that echoes the heroic chant of some of Brecht’s poems. But just to complicate things, A Foz em Delta justifies its title by also flowing in a completely different direction, marked by elegiac characteristics.
 

Political communication, the field of research of Rita Figueiras – a professor at the Universidade Católica, has a wide range of sophisticated tools at its disposal in the current era of new digital technologies, the Internet and social media, which can build a completely mediatised public space subject to manipulation on every level. Success on the political stage has thus become dependent on communication techniques developed within the digital ecosystem.