A renowned biographer and professor of Biographical Writing at the Nova University of Lisbon, Maria Antónia Oliveira shares her experience as an author of literary and artistic biographies, reflecting on the relationship that arises between biographer and biographee. In this essay, which at times takes on an intentionally autobiographical tone, the questions of the link between life and work are understood from a historical perspective and examined with an astute clarity.

In this issue of Electra, the ‘Subject’ section focuses on the age-old and forever renewed question of the relationship between the life of authors (writers, artists, philosophers, etc.) and their work, a problem that also arises outside of the specifically ‘authorial’ realm, implicating public figures, especially those who hold political roles and responsibilities. Their private lives have increasingly become an object of media interest, often with the complicity or active collaboration of those implicated.

Sepideh Karami is an Iranian architect, writer, teacher and researcher whose work brings architecture into domains as diverse as performing arts, literature and geology. Professor of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, she tells us here about the city where she chose to live and work, with a unique gaze, both near (where it finds itself) and far (from where it came). On her verbal journey through Scotland's capital, Sepideh tells us what she sees, what she deciphers, what she interprets and what she guesses. From buildings to gardens, from the general to the particular, from gestures to objects, from the ground to the sky, the author describes a city made up of many spaces and many times, many speeds and many layers of meaning. At the beginning, it is stated: ‘Edinburgh is the city of getting wet and dry in quick succession.’ And it is as if this climatic antithesis runs through the entire text to teach us how to feel Edinburgh and what happens there.

Any history of modern contemporary culture in Brazil would not be complete without mentioning the unparalleled Semana de Arte Moderna (São Paulo, 1922). It was at this decisive, controversial and agitated event that Yvonne Daumerie – dancer, choreographer, singer, composer, instrumentalist, declaimer and teacher – performed. Brazilian curator, writer and critic Veronica Stigger speaks to us about this multi-talented artist and her almost forgotten and ignored passage through the world. Bringing to the present the traces of her existence in the past, it is as if Veronica wishes to let us see this ghost and her dance erased by time.

More than a decade after the Great Earthquake of Fukushima (East Japan, 2011), Taro Igarashi analyses, in this essay, the impact on architecture and art of a catastrophe of this magnitude and the lessons provided by the demands of reconstruction. The author is a historian and critic of architecture and a professor at the University of Tohoku, Japan. He was curator of the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice International Architecture Biennale, in 2008, and artistic director of the Aichi Triennale, in 2013. He is one of the authors of Louis Vuitton: Art, Fashion and Architecture (2009).

The staging, in Bayreuth, of The Ring of the Nibelung, directed by Valentin Schwarz, is the object of an analysis that considers it a failure due to the way it treats or omits the theological question in Wagner’s work.

Not so long ago we rarely encountered the verb ‘scrutinise’. And not even a glimpse of it in literary texts. We cannot pronounce or write such a word without crashing against its materiality, without feeling the friction and sound of its consonants.

Whoever is reading the words and seeing the images of this Editorial knows that they have arrived at them because their attention has been drawn to Electra, either in the present or in the past. In a world-event saturated with signs (linguistic, acoustic, visual) and icons, signifiers and constant flows of information, seductions and requests, calls and invitations, technological dependencies and media compulsions, the reader has had their attention fought over between Electra and many other things that every day, every hour, every minute, ask for, claim and demand their attention. By deciding to give their attention to our magazine, the reader has made a choice which represents willingness, time, disposition, interest, investment. This is when attention becomes tension, temptation, intention.

The US author, professor and critic Svetlana Alpers, whose ground-breaking work redefined the field of art history in the last decades, has recently been awarded the 2023 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art by the College Art Association of America. In this conversation with Electra, Svetlana Alpers reflects on a lifetime spent thinking and writing about looking, revisiting the journey that has taken her from her early studies on Tiepolo, Rembrandt, and Rubens, to her most recent interest in both photographic images and autobiographical writing.

A renowned and award-winning essayist, fiction writer and journalist, Sergio del Molino is currently a columnist for the newspaper El País. His book La España Vacia [Empty Spain], published in 2016, sparked a national debate on depopulation and the country-city relationship and is now considered a reference work for understanding contemporary Spain. In this ‘View of Delft’, Molino writes about the city of Zaragoza, giving us a portrait in which time and space, history and geography, literature and art come together and accompany us on an unforgettable tour of this city ‘which sums up Europe in one of its main paradoxes: it is an extremely old city that is also very new.’