This issue’s dossier addresses a theme that is almost the very essence of archetypal differences: the city- countryside dichotomy. Almost like a warning to the incautious, however, it must be said at the very outset that this dichotomy, while retaining its expressive and symbolic value crystallised by our binary representations, is no longer as relevant or operative as it once was. This polarisation still exists in our imagination and even corresponds to an ideal, but in many respects it no longer coincides with its true original meaning: the countryside increasingly resembles the city or, at least, is increasingly home to more urban working habits and lifestyles. As Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas wrote over a decade ago, in an essay entitled Countryside, even ‘husbandry of the land is now a digital practice’.

Great books are not loved. Their authors even less so. Great writers are not loved. Their books even less so. The former are always tainted by the suspicion that they are too free. The latter are suspected of allowing themselves this freedom. In either case, this freedom will never be enough for books and their authors. Enough to exhaust the possibilities of freedom itself. This is what gives rise to fear (provoking ‘hostility’, according to Bernhard). In this, they would not like their readers to be more self-sufficient than they are, which is more frightening still.

Under this title, Jay Pather, a choreographer, curator, and associate professor at the University of Cape Town, opens the way for a visit to the city – ‘topographically this was where apartheid was created’ – where ‘hauntings, irony and paradox abound everywhere’. From the initial exhilaration of the Mandela era to its melting away, an effort is now being made to use art as a form of energy for the ‘wresting of these hauntings’.

Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates. In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their established boundaries.

The general theme chosen by the curator, architect Hashim Sarkis, for the International Architecture Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia 2021 is How will we live together? With the pandemic all around us, the event raises questions about our future living conditions in a world that is increasingly divided and unequal. The exhibition also shows how the curator’s work has turned into an instrument capable of shaking the Biennale to its core. Curator, historian and critic Julia Albani was in Venice and has sent Electra a report of what she saw and how she saw what she saw.

Born in Córdoba, María Sánchez is a writer and veterinarian. For her, these two professions are a combination full of interactions and surprises. From her diary we learn that her days are filled with searches and encounters. María talks about houses and travelling, books and animals, flowers and fruit, the sun and the rain, the body and writing, land and women, love and friendship. ‘Last night I had dinner with Sofia and Paola. We were all tired. We were talking about how the days race by, about the speed at which things happen and how our bodies have to keep up. The signs are appearing. We need to stop, to do nothing.’ And so we see, in this passage from the ‘Book of Hours’ entrusted to Electra, how time is what we make of it.

Valerio Olgiati is a renowned Swiss architect and teacher in prestigious universities. With an international career and a powerful body of work, he stands out both as a practicing architect and a scholar. In this portfolio chosen for Electra we present images of some of his most iconic projects. Three students from the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, in Italian-speaking Switzerland, where Olgiati currently teaches, write about his work in a dialogue between generations.

In this interview, Vandana Shiva, one of the most well-known environmental activists of our time, speaks of her work in support of organic agriculture, both in her home country, India, and on a global level. The main topics addressed are the indispensable role of women in a caring, human and ecological economy, and the need for us to resist the distortion of the original meanings of words in the language of the market and colonization.

Taste, as an object for reflection in the aesthetic theory of the 18th century, the century of taste, particularly by encyclopaedists, requires an incursion into the questions of beauty and goodness. Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, professor at the University of Milan and author of an extensive bibliography in the area of Aesthetics, does just this.

In this essay, science historian Iwan Rhys Morus shows how, in the 19th century, the concepts of ‘new’ and ‘progress’ changed and how another idea of the future was invented, which became inseparable from science and technology. Morus is a university professor of History in Wales and has published important studies on scientific advances in the Victorian era and their consequences for culture (for example, the creation of science fiction novels by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells).