In this essay, Mark Wigley considers the place of architecture in the new economy of attention. With one eye on the historical past and the other on the technological future, he analyses both the discourses about and those produced by architecture, looking for continuities and discontinuities over time. He also questions what it means to pay attention to architecture. A professor at several universities, such as Princeton and Columbia in the USA, Wigley is an architect, historian, theorist and critic, and has curated several landmark exhibitions, such as at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example.

The statement I propose to discuss here is based, it would seem, on an ambiguity that Rafael García Santos himself later attempts to clarify when he states: ‘Suppose you eat at McDonald’s; while I can’t say it’s gastronomy, it’s the future.’ Why? Because, the Spanish food critic argues, ‘it is aimed at the young and connects with new customers,’ ‘gets rid of waiters and cooks’ and, lastly, ‘uses artificial intelligence’.

Starting with a dubious ‘discovery’ by a French classical literature scholar that the real authors of Louise Labé’s works are actually men, the writer and artist Olivia Rosenthal writes about the effacement of women from the history of art and of literature.

Contemporary art can be seen and analysed as a system consisting of various figures and institutions that depend on each other or establish mutual relationships. This map drawn by the sociology of art is much more difficult to produce if we use an aesthetic criterion, not only because there is not just one answer to the question ‘what is contemporary?’ but also because the landscape is heteroclite and difficult to navigate. However, this has not been an obstacle to the wide expansion of the category known as ‘contemporary art’.

Daisy Dixon, lecturer at Cardiff University, author of essays and academic articles in the field of the philosophy of art, herself an artist, writes on a complex issue: how can we talk about lies with regards to artistic images? The starting point for this reflection is a staged photograph that purports to be documentary.

In this diary, Pedro Cabrita Reis describes his senses to the world. They're all there, all five of them, shrewd, active and as alert as antennae to the news of nature and the scintillations of culture.

This sculptor, painter, sketcher, bon vivant (in its most literal sense) and citizen of the world believes that art is life without quotes and life is art without delay. He feels that the world is the largest studio and the studio is the closest world.

The pages in this diary are in facsimile form because the handwriting and sketches intertwine, entangle, interlock, possess each other and belong to each other, and only in this single, unique form do they belong to us. Here we find what, in Cabrita Reis, is the most vivid, a vitality that makes everything his.

This 'Book of Hours' is based on a private agenda and takes the form of music notation. It speaks to us of a certain poetically inhabiting the world, without which we don't inhabit it.

Attention is a scarce, precious asset, and attracting it is as costly as a real ‘civil war’ on a universal scale. It is the commodity that dictates the value of all other commodities, be they material or immaterial, real or symbolic. More sophisticated mechanisms have been created in efforts to attract attention and tactics have been invented to make us passive, anaesthetised hostages. An attention economy has thus become a powerful field in the general economy, boosted substantially by new technologies for which attention is absolute capital. The ability to attract attention and the idea of disputing and competing for it is the condition that governs not only the strict field of economics but also everything pertaining to political and cultural life. Today, attention itself is the object of attention and scrutiny. It is this highly topical matter that is addressed by the articles featured in this issue of Electra.

Youssef Rakha is an author, journalist, literary critic, editor and photographer. He was born and still lives in Cairo, having studied English and Philosophy in the United Kingdom. His award-winning work is renowned, affording an opportunity for a bold linguistic renewal and reinvention of Arabic. Cairo is a city which discovers itself through his writing. In addition to fiction this author, who has many interests and engages in various activities, has written a great deal about the relationship between photography and literature. In the conversation which took place in Egypt, photographers and editors André Príncipe and João Pedro Cortes talk with Rakha about politics, religion, art, travel, life – the unhappiness we flee from and the hope that eludes us. With this piece, where words and images challenge each other, Príncipe and Cortes continue the series they began with Hisham Mayet in Tangier, published in Electra 7.

The ambassador and historian Bernardo Futscher Pereira writes a testimony about his initiation into football, the pleasure of playing, and his adult passion as a spectator, remembering a world populated by heroes.

The recent publication of the Portuguese edition of Hölderlin’s complete poems – Todos os Poemas – translated by João Barrento is the culmination of an exceptional undertaking. Literary critic João Oliveira Duarte reviews the significance of Hölderlin’s works, which had an extensive and multilayered reception throughout the twentieth century.