The cultural policies of democratic governments adhere to the principle that they cannot dictate taste, as they once did under totalitarian regimes, and therefore they must be protected by a series of interventions and bureaucratic protocols. This complex issue, the source of constant criticism, controversy and protest, is examined by writer and performance artist Patrícia Portela.

The subject of the dossier in this issue of Electra is a scarce and therefore highly controversial resource that has been the centre of an all-out competition war to manage to attract it. We are talking about attention, the faculty that is the subject of countless alarmist discourses assuring us that it is in crisis, that our brains are suffering the dangerous effects of new technologies and that there are clear signs that our mental processes are deteriorating.

– Goooooooal!

This cry, which echoes inside itself and extends until it seems inextinguishable, has been endlessly shouted around the world since it was heard on 22nd January, 1927, during the first football commentary broadcast by the BBC, allowing this match to enter English homes.

The fashion industry today is a complex, governed by the laws of vulgarity, futility, waste and acceleration typical of fast fashion: this is how Rosie Findlay, professor at the University of Kent and author of research works in this area, describes the effects of an industry that commands: ‘Don't think, buy’.

Based on an exhibition, presented in 2024 at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK), and a seminar held at the same time at the Technical University of the same city, architect and researcher Gilles Delalex, founder of Studio Muoto and one of the curators of the French Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2023, answers an untimely question: similarly to various political ideologies — social democracy, liberalism, communism or fascism — can anarchist thought generate architecture? In order to answer this question, which crosses a historical perspective with an observation of the present, it is architecture which examines itself.

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.

In this article, the author of Etica dei resti [The Ethics of Remnants], Gianluca Cuozzo, professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, develops a philosophy of waste and an analysis of rubbish and refuse as the dark and recalcitrant side of our consumer civilisation.

This ‘Metropolitan’ takes Neom as its theme, a colossal urban architectural project currently being constructed in the remote deserts of Saudi Arabia, causing fiction to imitate reality. Due to its bold objectives (‘to build a city to “reset” urban living’) and the financial and technological resources it mobilises, this complex project is subject to both great aspirations and controversies, raising fundamental questions which have important ethical, cultural, social and political implications. The author, João Bravo da Costa, is an architect with a recognised international career which began in the studios of three Pritzker Prize winners: Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. Knowing this region of the world well, he combines personal experience with innovative theoretical reflection in this essay written for Electra.

I can’t quite explain how I’ve been feeling lately without turning back to one night, six years ago. I was still living in the United States then, in Providence, midway through my PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. On that November night in 2016, I watched the election returns at the home of Brazilianist and historian James Green. There were beer, snacks, and a guest of honor: Jean Wyllys, then Brazil’s only openly gay congressman.

It was as if speed, which was the subject that had been planned and announced long ago for this edition, had morphed into the image of our perplexity and blended into the measure of our distance from things. This edition of Electra was ready to go to print when life changed completely. Suddenly spaces closed and time turned about face, pulling tomorrow into today and slowly leading today into tomorrow.