In this issue of Electra, two ‘Books of Hours' chronicle the days leading up to Brazil’s presidential runoff election that caught the attention of the entire world. The authors are Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, writer, translator, and research director at Radio Novelo, born in the United States and based in Rio de Janeiro; and Rodrigo Nunes, a university professor in Brazil who holds a PhD from the University of London, with a vast, widely cited work on philosophy and political science. In this period of political uncertainty, apprehension and uneasiness, people lived every moment with a stressful and overwhelming intensity. These journals give us two different but complementing insights into everyday life and politics at the time of the clash between Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. And then there are the people, animals, books, films, and day-to-day acts that have become long-lasting symbols with each passing day.

I can’t quite explain how I’ve been feeling lately without turning back to one night, six years ago. I was still living in the United States then, in Providence, midway through my PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. On that November night in 2016, I watched the election returns at the home of Brazilianist and historian James Green. There were beer, snacks, and a guest of honor: Jean Wyllys, then Brazil’s only openly gay congressman.

The aftermath of the first round of voting carried much apprehension and worry; for two weeks, there was a sense that never had a victory felt so much like a defeat – as if we had been blindsided once again and knocked down by reality. I had never really believed a win would be as straightforward as the opinion polls suggested. Nevertheless, I was shocked when the results from, say, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro started to come in; even after the four-year term of a disastrous administration that seemed to be self-evidently so, Bolsonarism proved to be much stronger than we thought. Many had laboured under the illusion that we were still living, essentially, in the same country that had elected four consecutive centre-left administrations, and everything would go back to the way it was – once this unpleasant interlude was over. That illusion was now shattered once and for all.

João Pedro Fróis, professor and researcher at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, writes about the exceedingly singular artist Jaime Fernandes (1899–1969), who was committed to the Bombarda Insane Asylum (later Miguel Bombarda Hospital) from 1938 until his death. Jaime’s drawings (in pen, biro or ink on paper) turned him into a remarkable representative of art brut, to whom filmmaker António Reis dedicated his 1974 eponymous film Jaime.

José Miranda Justo, Germanist, translator and artist, comments here on a sentence taken from Letters to a Young Poet, by Rilke, which deals with the complex relationship between the work of art and criticism.

Yves Klein's exhibition on emptiness was presented sixty-five years ago, in 1958, at Galerie Iris Clert, in Paris, and is considered a fundamental moment in the history of art. This essay by Steffen Dix takes it as the starting point for a personal journey into questioning the place of the void in art and philosophy. Along with Klein's name are those of Giorgio de Chirico, with his metaphysical painting, Friedrich Nietzsche, with his philosophy of affirming life as a work of art, and Fernando Pessoa, with his heteronyms and his city. Steffen Dix is a German researcher and university professor. A specialist in religious history and modernism in Europe, he is also a translator and the author of renowned studies on Fernando Pessoa.

One of the most highly-acclaimed contemporary theorists of the image and the visual, the French philosopher Marie-José Mondzain has recently ventured into the domain of the written word, by addressing Kafka’s work in a surprising essay about the possibility of decolonisation on the basis of literary fiction. Afonso Dias Ramos writes about her latest book, K comme Kolonie, Kafka et la décolonisation de l'imaginaire [K for Kolony – Kafka and the Decolonisation of the Imaginary].

Those who believe that the future will always be worse should cast their minds back 2500 years to classical Athens to discover the original dilettante influencers, if by such we mean those who apparently make a living almost without lifting a finger. Socrates wrote nothing – at least nothing for which we have a record – and yet he is a milestone in the history of philosophy. So let us not be so alarmed by the wave of influencers surrounding us today, but rather by the people who are so easily influenced.

Biding our time means being able to extract from ourselves and the world the ideas, words and images that fix time in its defiant immutability and prolong its insolent mobility. This is why Parmenides, the master of being, and Heraclitus, the philosopher of the future, kept up a dialogue and a debate that Electra has been listening to attentively.

Valerio Olgiati is a renowned Swiss architect and teacher in prestigious universities. With an international career and a powerful body of work, he stands out both as a practicing architect and a scholar. In this portfolio chosen for Electra we present images of some of his most iconic projects. Three students from the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, in Italian-speaking Switzerland, where Olgiati currently teaches, write about his work in a dialogue between generations.