Here, Cristina Fernandes interprets and comments on one of the thoughts that Paul Valéry turned into an aphorism. In her writing (which we can read in the ‘Bicho Ruim’ blog that she has with Rui Manuel Amaral and soon in a book entitled C de C) she also cultivates short prose.

With Les contes cruels de Paulo Rego, the great Portuguese painter is the first living artist to have a solo show at the Musée de L’Orangerie – a show widely reported in the press and praised by the critics. This is also the French public’s first big chance to get up close to a body of work they have no more than glimpsed in the past. João Pinharanda, an art historian and critic, explores the history (and the psychology) of France’s relationship with this oeuvre and its violence, seeking an answer to a puzzle that might only now be within our grasp. Deciphering this enigma is a crucial step towards discovering both the drive behind Rego’s work and the imprint of a culture.

Name: Paulo Nozolino. Profession: photographer. We can start with this simple bio. Guided by the interview below, we can then enter the ‘lab’ of this nomadic photographer, who crosses borders and is radically averse to serene places and their tranquil images.

By biographical circumstance, the writer and architectural historian Paulo Varela Gomes was an inhabitant and observer of the countryside and country living for over a decade. This experience offered him plenty of food for thought. For him, who had always been immersed in city issues and culture, it represented an important theoretical challenge, as you can gather in this passage from one of his texts where this question arises.

An exhibition by Pedro A.H. Paixão at Galeria 111 in Lisbon in the first half of 2020 is revisited here by the art critic José Marmeleira. In Aurora. Desenhos e Outros Materiais, this Milan-based artist creates work which is as consistent in its results as it is in the theoretical thought that underlies it, as it encounters the canonical genres of art history such as drawing and the portrait.

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.