Philippe Descola, who had Claude Lévi-Strauss as a superior and completed his PhD under his wing, has been a central figure of Anthropology since he published Par-delà nature et culture [Beyond Nature and Culture]. The thesis developed in this book had, and continues to have, tremendous resonance beyond its disciplinary field. The new times, characterised by the criticism of European ethnocentrism, are favourable to the triumphant reception of his work.

In 1928, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was twenty years old. She left Portugal to study art in Paris and, from France, visited Italy on a study trip. While on her travels to Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, Bologna, Florence and Pistoia, she made quick pencil drawings of what she saw in a sketchbook. At the same time, she wrote letters to her mother, in a complicit tone, about her impressions, discoveries and feelings. These drawings and letters, which establish an intimate and concordant dialogue between them, remained unpublished. They belonged to the artist’s personal legacy, which was later added to the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation collection. A selection of these words and images is revealed here by Electra constituting a very interesting record of the formative years of this great painter, who was born in Lisbon and lived in Paris, and whose masterful work is represented in the world’s most important museums and collections.

Eighty years ago, on 19 April, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took the first intentional psychedelic trip with LSD. This discovery-trip had radical effects on culture and art (literature, visual arts, music, dance, cinema), becoming a symbol – both deified and demonised – of counterculture and the hippie movement. An author of works on this subject, Marcelo Leite is an award-winning journalist and columnist for the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, where he regularly writes about science and the environment. In this essay, he discusses the research that has been going on since the 1990s with a view to the pharmacological and therapeutic use of psychedelics, especially in neurology and psychiatry.

‘From the second half of the twentieth century, architecture became aware that the ground was also a territory for design. In the fifties, Pikionis’s delicate design for the Acropolis access in Athens taught architects to look down again, just like some premodern cultures had done when designing tiles and pavements.’ This essay written for Electra by Chilean architect, researcher and curator Francisco Díaz tells us about this return. His latest book, published this year, is actually entitled Suelos [Soils]. Taking the City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela as a case in point, he tells us about the relationship between soil and terrain. Grounded in various types of knowledge, Díaz's gaze at the same time questions, investigates, guesses, discovers, records and ponders.

In 2023, three exhibitions by Rui Chafes were held in Lisbon and Porto. With a career spanning four decades and a body of work that uses sculpture, drawing and text as its mediums, he is a key figure in contemporary art in Portugal and one of those who has achieved the greatest international projection. In this section, the artist, essayist and university professor João Sousa Cardoso talks about this oeuvre, revisiting the three exhibitions and leaving a future memory of them.

Comfortable is used in the interrogative form: are you comfortable? The question never denotes an intimate relationship between those who ask and those who answer (in love, comfort does not help). Are you comfortable with the rules of the company, for example, or with something that I said that you might disapprove of? We ask in the affirmative about what we imagine might upset or offend. Are you comfortable with the place you are expected to occupy, instead of are you comfortable with the place you are not expected to leave? This bond is not horizontal, it is skewed. Those who ask are in the position to provide comfort or discomfort, a remnant of the power held by the feudal lord over the life and death of his serfs. Letting them live granted him automatic magnanimity.

History is made up of what continues within us; it reminds us of what we did not live, or imagines what we have lived, which consequently becomes even more ours. The great historian Fernand Braudel, in one of his Écrits sur l’histoire, states that great political and social upheavals urge us to think or rethink the Universe.

The most important Italian literary critic, Alfonso Berardinelli who gave a valuable interview in Electra 20, writes here about Italo Calvino, the great author who, guided by structuralism, took narrative, the short story and short forms to a supreme level of literary construction.

Michael Hardt, one of the most distinguished political theorists of our time, talks to Electra about love and revolution, language and liberation, and his new project about the renewed urgency of looking at the global revolutionary movements of the 1970s.

The series of articles that compose the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra deal with the topic of excess. Since the criterion behind these thematic sections, treated according to a regime of essayistic discourse, is to highlight and navigate some territories that have gained prominence within the contemporary panorama, excess, in its ceaseless and wild manifestations in every domain of social, cultural and political life, is the quintessential contemporary topic, the rule under which we live.