In a very original text written for the dossier of this edition of Electra, the architect, historian, theorist and critic Mark Wigley, author of a work that is noted for the novelty of the questions it raises and the audacity of its relationships with art, philosophy, culture and technology, speaks of the conceptual attitude of architecture, as a possibility of activity, in the face of idleness. Wigley has been a professor at prestigious universities, such as Princeton and Columbia, in the USA. He has curated exhibitions in several museums, including MoMA in New York, where the landmark exhibition ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’ (with Philip Johnson) was presented. Together with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Booman, in 2005 he founded Volume Magazine.

‘When I went to Harvard, people thought that social housing was not architecture’, recalls architect Alejandro Aravena in this interview given to architect and researcher Ana Vaz Milheiros, for Electra. Distinguished with the Pritzker Prize in 2016, Alejandro Aravena is known worldwide for the originality of his work, in which the relationship between architecture, housing, society and nature is of paramount importance. In this conversation, punctuated by themes that are present in the plural activity that he has been developing, Aravena also talks about the experience of designing and building in Lisbon.

The woke movement, or, to use a more appropriate name, the woke injunction, is a war cry that has summoned new forms of struggle and antagonisms to the public space where exacerbated stances are taken. Although in a serene manner, the two opposing texts in this section participate in this division: that of the Belgian writer and philosopher Véronique Bergen, who sees in 'wokism' a legitimate desire for emancipation that, however, 'falls into the opposite', and that by Carolina Flores, Portuguese philosopher and researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who conducts the anti-woke critique.

A socio-political movement developed in the United States by activists denouncing systemic racism and structural violence against ethnic, sexual and religious minorities, wokeism demands social justice and emancipatory change in the way we live and inhabit the Earth. Based on the concept of awakening (‘woke’), it attacks the ideological barriers and mechanisms of domination that oppress minorities.

In March, in an interview on the conservative American TV channel Fox News, Bethany Mandel – author of the anti-woke book Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation – was asked to define ‘woke’. Hesitatingly, she uttered, ‘So, I mean, woke is, sort of the idea that, umm... I... I mean woke is something that’s very hard to define...’, before finally offering an almost incomprehensible definition: ‘It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally re-imagine and re-do society to create hierarchies of oppression...’. As she herself anticipated, the moment went viral.

The dossier included in this edition of Electra looks at two concepts, idleness and leisure, the understanding of which has shifted and turned over their long history. We explore how leisure and idleness are seen today, in the awareness that the current meaning of these formerly opposing ideas cannot be properly understood without looking back to a time we have left behind and can only contemplate from afar. Once radically different from each other, these two concepts tend to overlap in modern society, with only a few slight differences: whilst leisure is understood as a break from our working schedule, idleness points to an existential condition or a psychological characteristic with negative connotations. The former dichotomy has dissolved and been transferred to another pair of ideas, much more relevant to us today: the relationship between work and leisure, the alternation between which underpins life in the society of work.

André Barata, professor at the University of Beira Interior and author of several essays that reflect on the production of meaning and the transformations that mark our time, begins this article with the observation that the boundaries between work and leisure have dissolved. In the end, he reaches the conclusion that, in our time, idleness is rejected.

‘Life is a game’: this is how we may state the principle that determines a generalised gamification of the world we live in. Clare Siegel, a professor at the Paul Valéry University of Montpellier, whose work has focused on the relationship between video games and the visual arts, writes about this issue, which invokes the notion of homo ludens.

The 'cultural industry', as it was described by Adorno and Horkheimer, imposed a new relationship between culture and free time. Based on the analyses of the Frankfurt School, Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, professor at the Department of Communication and Social Psychology at the University of Alicante, author, among other books, of Mascaras de la mentira: el nuevo desorden de la posverdad [Masks of lies: the new post-truth disorder], writes about the regime of entertainment under the condition of digital culture.

The Italian philosopher Francesco Masci, who is based in France, develops a radical idea in this article: that entertainment is much more than an aspect of current culture, that it is ‘the most advanced stage of absolute culture’, the phenomenon that organises all dimensions of modern society.