This article by Filomena Silvano, professor at NOVA University of Lisbon and author of the book Antropologia da Moda [Anthropology of Fashion], is about the relationship between taste and fashion and the construction of ourselves through the way we dress, extending into a reflection on the epochal transformations in the way fashion functions.

Almost a decade after publishing 24/7, an acclaimed essay about how the contemporary economic system forces us to work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, abolishing the possibility of rest or even sleep, the US theorist Jonathan Crary talks to Electra about his newly-released book, Scorched Earth. This new work is an uncompromising analysis of how the digital era has failed to bring about the radical change that it once heralded, and instead revealed itself to be incompatible with the idea of a sustainable planet and of interdependence among human beings.

Alireza Taghaboni is one of the most renowned Iranian architects. He lives in the capital of Iran, where he is the author of landmark projects. In his work, he combines the practice of architecture with reflection on the same. He is frequently invited to participate in international conferences and congresses on contemporary architecture. In the essay he has written for Electra, Taghaboni talks about the architecture of Tehran created after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq war. Analysing some architectural and urban examples that he considers to be paradigmatic, he uses the concepts of desire and practice as indicative of what circumstances, events and changes have allowed, prevented or forced to happen.

The books of Günther Anders, the German philosopher of technology who saw in the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the entry into a new era and who diagnosed the ‘obsolescence’ of the human race, are today the object of a rediscovery that makes them current in our time of Artificial Intelligence, the post-human and the rebirth of the nuclear threat.

Based on a passage from her interview with French writer Annie Ernaux (awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022) for a magazine in 2021, the Italian novelist, translator and journalist Simonetta Greggio talks about the fundamental contribution of Ernaux’s work and public position in giving names to nameless things, as their existence was denied, hidden or ignored.

Rita Azevedo Gomes’ cinematographic oeuvre is a meeting place for literature and cinema. She worked with Agustina Bessa-Luís on a number of occasions. The last was on the film A Portuguesa [The Portuguese], which was based on a short story of the same name by Robert Musil, with dialogues written by Agustina Bessa-Luís. In this ‘Register’ the film director and screenwriter evokes the rich life and approach to death of the writer of A Sibila [The Sybil]. ‘And now, it is in a state somewhere between fervour and panic that I am writing here, following only my own memories, in my search for Agustina.’ As Rita recalls what she found in her and heard from her, she paints us a personal portrait of this exceptional author and her ‘infinite writing, this blanket that covers and discovers us all’.

The word nomad comes from the Latin nomas, -ădis, which in turn comes from the Greek νομάς, -άδος. For some reason that only intuition can understand, nomad seems to be close to the root of nostalgia (νόστος, ‘returning home’, –algia); however, the ‘no’ in nomad is not a probable node in the nostalgic stem. Nevertheless, the omen of returning home is always looming in a nomad’s future, as if it were the shadow of the word’s meaning. For that reason, nomads tend towards an odd form of nostalgia.

The word ‘architecture’ is used in English, but speaks ancient Greek (and later learned Latin), since it is there that it finds the origins and foundations of the two terms that compose it etymologically: arkhé (chief, master) and tékhton (construction, builder, worker). In this way, we can conclude that in the word ‘architecture’ there is the sense of directing workers (many today would say: lead) and that the architect is the one who directs (leads) them.

Idleness, leisure, work, free time, entertainment: these concepts and figures, around which the themed dossier presented here is built, form a constellation inhabited by many tensions which have been given a certain movement by our time. There are oppositions that have disappeared or been replaced by others; there are expansions and triumphant positions, which is the case of leisure, as would be expected in a society that has placed work at its centre and expelled idleness, like someone who eradicates a vice or an evil. Currently, activities that were the offspring of idleness (arts, literature, sciences, philosophy, etc.) have been assimilated into work and thus fall under its regime. Our relationship with accelerated time and the triumph of the merchandised form, to the point where leisure itself has been totally captured, largely determine the types of leisure and its status in our time. At the same time, programmed compulsory entertainment has monopolised extensive swathes of culture and become a task which extends those that fall under the category of work. All this is proof that the boundaries between some of these entities have dissolved, or at least weakened.

An important Italian thinker in the ‘autonomist’ tradition, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has written lucidly on the labour system and on how meaning and value are produced in the age of cognitive capitalism. This interview, conducted in Lisbon after a talk at the Teatro do Bairro Alto, takes us on a brief excursion through these theoretical territories.