One of the most eagerly anticipated books of the last decade, the monumental study The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, draws on modern anthropology and archaeology to radically transform how history has been told over the last three centuries, dismantling certain assumptions about social evolution – from the invention of agriculture and the city, to the origins of inequality and democracy – to summon new possibilities for human emancipation. Afonso Dias Ramos writes about a book that has found itself embroiled in a heated intellectual discussion.

We live under the imperial rule of narratives. That is certainly not new. Homo sapiens have always been indistinguishable from homo fabulator, but in the post-truth era, narrative imperialism has grown and intensified (recall that ‘post truth’ was declared word of the year in 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries).

The title of a famous work by Vermeer, of which Proust said: ‘It’s the most beautiful painting in the world’, lends its name to this section of Electra. José Manuel dos Santos addresses this work (View of Delft), the city that is represented in it (Delft) and the city where it can be seen (The Hague), in an evocation where the title of the text and the title of the section borrow from each other to become the same.

There are books that invite us to take in the currentness of their astute observation and daring imagination — an actuality based on a sound foundation of clarity and the cornerstone of foresight. And we know that this actuality, which is so surprising yet so charming to us, does not exist by chance, luck or accident. It is a form of shrewd, creative intelligence that comes closer to the truth, all the while stealing from ensuing times, so as to be more itself in what has not yet been but is beginning to be.

Examining the city today with its metamorphoses and aggravated manifestations, such as its most eloquent sign, the megalopolis – which some see as decline and others as a mark of huge vitality – is an exercise that places us on terrain exposed to every aspect of political, social and cultural life. The city is a theme of huge and impressive scope. In the age we live in, there is a particular appeal for an acceleration of the urban phenomenon and the unlimited expansion of the city alongside, and based on the same logic as, the total emptying of the countryside, which is the other side of a dichotomy that seemed epitomised by literary depictions and a relic-filled imaginary. However, certain current conditions and circumstances – the pandemic, the possibilities for digital nomadism, the gentrification of an ever-broader urban swathe and the economic logic that reserves the city for the wealthy and visitors – have brought the countryside to a place where only the city once seemed to exist. Thus, the classic dichotomy has been revived at a time when the environmental mayhem caused by climate change is forcing us to re-examine the city and the countryside as a whole and not in the polarised terms that modernism has encouraged.

In this dossier ‘City, Countryside’,
we present images from two artists. Thomas Struth is one of the most internationally recognised German photographers. Among his most well-known series of work is one about city streets that may be summarised in a single photograph: Unconscious Places. It is from this series that Struth has chosen the images for
this ‘Subject’ section of Electra.
With a body of work of great originality, the Portuguese painter João Hogan obsessively painted the vastness and harshness of the landscape, its aridity and its silence, often giving his paintings a metaphysical resonance. Some of these images are shown in this dossier.
What these photographs by Struth and paintings by Hogan have in common is the absence of people, thus offering the viewer a contemplation that better reveals the structural elements of the City and the Countryside.

Pedro Ignacio Alonso, architect and professor of Architectural Theory at the Catholic University of Chile, writes about the validity of the city-‑countryside dichotomy and the problems this raises at a time when the world has contracted through speed. Consequently, cities, no matter how distant they are from one another, form a single metropolitan area.

In this interview, Jorge Gaspar shows that his knowledge, as a geographer, of the Portuguese and European territory and of the various issues related to the countryside and the city extends to a literary and artistic culture. This gives his discourse the capacity to cross disciplinary borders, filling it with interesting and pertinent aspects.

On the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust, in a new essay written for Electra, renowned specialist Jean-Marc Quaranta shows how the work of the great French writer and all the investigations he has generated force us to see his life through other eyes, changing the very literary status of the author. It is, therefore, an authentic and original ‘reincarnation’. Jean-Marc Quaranta is a university professor and member of the Proust team. He is the author of Un amour de Proust. Alfred Agostinelli (1888-1914) and it was he who prepared, established, presented and annotated the edition of the novel Le Temps Perdu, which constituted a first version of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, published for the very first time in 2021.

The renowned German director and writer Alexander Kluge, who has worked with, among others, Theodor Adorno and Fritz Lang, has dedicated his life to thinking about images and their place in culture. For the ‘Portfolio’ of this issue of Electra, this fundamental figure of contemporary critical thinking talks with his collaborator, writer Ulrike Sprenger and Leander Gussmann, a researcher of artistic and cultural studies, about the analytical and cooperative method that he has developed in his monumental work. He shows how the images can be read, how they are superimposed and come into being, using an iconological grammar that is surprisingly revealing of the world and the time in which we live. True to his method, he also deals with current issues, such as the War and the opposition to it, and finally, with a central metaphor in his work: the garden. This conversation between Kluge and his interlocutors is made up of words and images, in a verbal-visual composition that, due to its originality and interest, constitutes a fundamental document that must not be lost.

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture, an agency that uses architecture as material evidence, leading independent investigations and partnering with international prosecutors and environmental and human rights groups to find, reconstruct, and expose violence. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Weizman discusses a decade of working across the boundaries between art and forensic analysis, journalism and the law, with advanced spatial and media investigations into key cases of state and corporate violence around the world.