The title of a famous work by Vermeer, of which Proust said: ‘It’s the most beautiful painting in the world’, lends its name to this section of Electra. José Manuel dos Santos addresses this work (View of Delft), the city that is represented in it (Delft) and the city where it can be seen (The Hague), in an evocation where the title of the text and the title of the section borrow from each other to become the same.

This section offers an analysis and interpretation of Pedro Costa’s latest film, Vitalina Varela, which is understood as ‘a narrative of wickedness’. Vitalina and Ventura may well be the representation of a ‘people of the shadows’ who form a vanguard, as Hannah Arendt already mentioned with regard to the figure of the refugee.

Photographer Viviane Sassen has prepared a set of recent, unpublished works for this edition of Electra. They simultaneously show what has made her stand out as an artist throughout her career and the current phase of her visual creations. In an essay presenting her work, the curator and writer Josseline Black says: ‘The merging of the fashion and fine art photography worlds has been achieved by few, and Sassen is at the forefront of this movement, to the delicate extent that she eschews categorisation.’ Black underscores the influence of surrealism on the artist and the photographs shown in this Portfolio. She points out, ‘One of the outstanding qualities of these photographs is that they need no description, and in this sense their worldliness is otherworldly. We return to attuning with the idea of “looking the world in the face”, making eye contact with what is before oneself. The fine and almost totemic play between photography and painting in these images is also a testament to the gentle undoing of expectation.’

Walid Raad catalogues the images collected in the Portfolio for Electra 8 under the signature Farid Sarroukh, “a mediocre painter who was irked (but not surprised) by his colleagues’ eager collaboration with the militias”. As Fernando Pessoa and Jorge Luis Borges show, we are all the Other of Ourselves. These lines, which are in this magazine as if it were another, speak of Walid Raad – and it is of Farid Sarroukh, too, that we are speaking.

Several Lebanese artists volunteered their services during the war years and created camouflage military fatigues for the fighting militias. Their designs were catalogued in this book by Farid Sarroukh, a mediocre painter who was irked (but not surprised) by his colleagues’ eager collaboration with the militias.

The last volume of War and Peace was published in 1869, that is, 150 years ago. It is one of the great universal novels. A book for a varied reading public, this epic of Russian literature, a Matryoshka novel with many subplots within, was challenged from the outset. It has a full history, recounted here by Dan Ungurianu, a professor of Russian studies in New York. What he asks here is a persistent question: why is it so difficult to argue against War and Peace? In response, Ungurianu speaks of the book and its author, drawing a lively and precise portrait of Tolstoy.

This book, which she signs with a lower-case pseudonym, is the manifesto of a woman who was born in the United States in 1952. This woman, bell hooks, is also black. It is important to say ‘also’ because the whole issue of the book, as Marta Lança demonstrates, is the conjunction of a gender identity and a ‘racial’ identity.
 

The relationship between seeing and reasoning – the starting point for a commentary on a Becket character by Fernando Belo, a prolific author whose output ranges from teleological studies to the philosophy of language. Requested by Electra two months before the author’s death, the article is now also a tribute to the man and the philosopher, whose singular career joyfully cut across the borders of knowledge and academic disciplines.

Never before has there been such a lot of public discussion about animals, so much care and concern about how they are treated and what happens to them. Never before have animals, and not just pets, played such an important role in the human and social worlds. Today there is a very far-reaching, lively ‘animal question’ that is simultaneously galvanising philosophy, ethics, politics (or bio-politics), law and ecology. To such an extent that in this day and age there is an animal turn, like previous turns that have gained the right to a trademark in the humanities and social sciences, such as the linguistic turn.

Visual artist Mónica de Miranda, historian Sónia Vaz Borges and choreographer Vânia Gala form the collective representing Portugal at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale, whose general theme is ‘Foreigners Everywhere’. The three authors have contributed to this edition of Electra with texts and images that reveal the major themes and motivations of the ‘Greenhouse’ project showcased in the Portuguese pavilion located at Palazzo Franchetti. This project features a Creole garden which serves as a starting point for exploring the themes of colonialism, war, liberation struggles, and ecology.