PASS. Apply, put, place, spread, cross, transpose, leave behind, exceed, employ, spend, transfer or sell, iron, filter, strain, transmit or be transmitted; publicise or be publicised (e.g.: radio reported the death, but television did not; this was reported in the news), propagate, put into circulation, dry in the sun or heat, omit, transcend, surpass, disappear, transmit, vanish, fleet, cross, evaporate, go on, give, move, flit, flow, transition, fugacious, fugitive

Continuing his journey around the Mediterranean, André Príncipe visited Tunisia. In La Goulette, at the port of Tunis, in the 19th century called ‘la petite Sicile’, he attended a concert by Badiaa Bouhrizi, known by her stage name Neysatu. It is with this singer songwriter, author and composer, an activist for freedom and social justice, that the photographer and editor converses, on behalf of Electra, about politics, music, djinns and African identities. Words join images here in an interview that addresses some of the themes of our global contemporaneity.

A ‘forest city’ is what Ruedi Baur is proposing in opposition to the ongoing urban destruction that is driving citizens and city-dwellers out of the city. The author of this article is a French-Swiss designer with a remarkable international career. He is the creator of the visual identity of the Pompidou Centre and a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon.

Robert Musil’s essays, recently translated into Portuguese under the title Ensaios [Essays], are the perfect embodiment of an era of which we have only recently perhaps been able to make sense. Nélio Conceição, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at NOVA University Lisbon, sheds light on their wide scope.

Afonso Dias Ramos writes about the recent release in France of an unpublished course on the relationship between painting and philosophy given by Gilles Deleuze in 1981, after moving to the University of Saint-Denis. This is an editorial milestone, rendering available to the public the French philosopher’s legendary weekly lectures from 1970 to 1987, which, up until now, had only been shared as audio recordings.

Toxic people, toxic environments, toxic whatnot – you know the spiel. Really toxic language, however, is the aftermath of an idea, and words come with a predefined format, as if they were not speech at all, but set in stone. And that stone is carried by the crowd that was schooled in how to be stupid according to a new infallible method.

There are lives that are so secretive and elusive that they are always confused with the shock of their end. There are works that are so secret and inexhaustible that they are always heading for the surprise of their beginning.

This portfolio by João Penalva, an artist widely renowned for works that combine video, installation, photography, music, performance, text and image, showcases a number of unpublished pictures: a series of black-and-white photographs taken during his walks across London, in a way that visually resembles the painted canvases of Abstract Expressionism, as the art historian Afonso Dias Ramos comments in the accompanying essay.

Lies have a history filled with possibilities. For this reason, we should not limit ourselves to the simple opposition between truth and lies, as if there were no subtle (and apparently paradoxical) modalities, such as the truth of lies and the lies of truth. In this history, the relationship between lies and politics has always been extremely important. We do not even have to evoke machiavellianism to understand that the bond between one and the other has an almost consubstantial nature. In our time, marked by the communication and dissemination of mass messages in a horizontal, rhizomatic public space, lies have entered a new regime, of which fake news is the extreme example. The notion of ‘post-truth’ (considered word of the year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary) emerged as a strange designation, which many thought was simply a new name for an old reality. But it is something else: post-truth is beyond true and false, dissolving the difference between these two poles. Therefore, it cannot be nullified by a rebuttal. This dossier of Electra does not only address these issues, however. It also examines other obligatory topics, such as art, fiction, delirium, and the powers of technology.

For the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra we have chosen a topic that is both universal and contemporary: lies. The various contributions trace routes with obligatory stops in politics (Martin Jay), art and images (Peter Hill and Daisy Dixon), the post-truth media regime (Myriam Revault d’Allonnes), the stages of phylogenetic natural history up to the hegemony of technology (António Bracinha Vieira), and the case studies of two Brazilian intellectuals persecuted and threatened by fake news (Bárbara Reis).