Peter Hill, Scottish-Australian artist, curator and professor at the University of Melbourne, author of Encyclopaedia of Superfictions, presents here, selected by a certain Fernão Mentes Minto, extracts from The Encyclopaedia of Lies which forms part of his ‘superfictions’.

When the end of one year is the beginning of the next, there is a hidden stoppage in this visible passage that makes time an intimate voice to remind us of what we have forgotten. This whispered voice is like that of the slow, mysterious songs that give a sun of light its moon of shadow. In every year that ends and surrenders to each year that begins, in a contiguous discontinuity, there is our will to measure, mark and change the time in us and us in time. This is how poets scan their verses so that the music leaps like a spark from a fire or a bird from a tree. There is an interval that we open only within ourselves to repeat the words of Paul Gauguin’s painting: ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’. 

The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the philosopher Déborah Danowski talked with Andrea Cavalletti about the book they co-authored, Há Mundo por Vir? Ensaio Sobre os Medos e os Fins [The Ends of the World]. An incursion into the imagery of the End, at a time when the fear of an ecological catastrophe has spread out.

Neil Kenny, professor of French literature and culture at Oxford University and author of the book The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany, examines the key stages in the complex and interesting history of curiosity from Ancient Rome to the modern age – from a time when it was deemed a moral vice to one where it is seen as a virtue that lies at the root of all knowledge.

After decades of uneasy silence, the past year or so has thrown up a series of unconnected episodes that feed into an ongoing debate about racism and the colonial legacy: speaking from a former slaving station (in Senegal), the Portuguese president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, felt it was relevant to point to the abolition of slavery under the Marquis of Pombal; a group of skinheads kept watch over a statue of Padre António Vieira, seen by many as a proponent of “selective slavery”; the Public Prosecution Service accused a number of police officers of racist abuse and violence against young people in Cova da Moura; the controversy over what to call the “Discoveries Museum” showed that the evolution over time of a single word is enough to paint a psychoanalytical portrait of a people. The USA has also seen a resurgence in the latent racial tensions that Obama preferred to let lie: the country now has a racist president in the White House and identity politics are on the up. Although I run the risk of being called untrue to my roots, or worse, these seemingly disparate events have prompted me to look again at the controversy concerning the intelligence of different ethnic groups. Why? Because this is the last vexata quaestio.

In one of his classes, Alexandre Alves Costa said the destruction of Cluny Abbey during the French Revolution – the paradigm of all the excesses and luxuries that characterised the Ancien Régime – represented an irreparable loss for architecture, but it was also the sign and affirmation of an irreproachable historical conquest. In fact, the history of architecture is nothing but the history of its permanent destruction, i.e. a long and endless list of burnt, plundered and imploded buildings.

American philosopher Avital Ronell, author of a book entitled Stupidity, continues here her attempt to understand and analyse the phenomenon and concept of stupidity, showing that, although situated in a space prior to speech, it can be appropriated by literature and by philosophy.

Raul Cerveira Lima, researcher in light pollution at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Science, University of Coimbra. This field of investigation has provided him with sufficient material and reasons for public interventions aimed at eliminating the factors that cause light pollution, a form of pollution that is rarely talked about. Night has been eliminated from the countryside by the imposition of the logic of urban life. This text is written in defence of the night.

For the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra we have chosen a topic that is both universal and contemporary: lies. The various contributions trace routes with obligatory stops in politics (Martin Jay), art and images (Peter Hill and Daisy Dixon), the post-truth media regime (Myriam Revault d’Allonnes), the stages of phylogenetic natural history up to the hegemony of technology (António Bracinha Vieira), and the case studies of two Brazilian intellectuals persecuted and threatened by fake news (Bárbara Reis).

This journalistic article by the reporter João Pacheco takes us into the laboratory where the celebrities of mass culture are created, and it shows the mechanisms and technologies – particularly TV – that engender them. Three Portuguese examples are looked at: the football player Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and the television host Cristina Ferreira.