In the diary written by the New York gallerist Ted Bonin for Electra, personal time and world time cling to each other in an endless embrace. In the days recorded, presence is a machine of absences. Here, what is found comes with what has been lost: artworks bring faces and faces bring deaths. Through these words, which sadden and cheer, travel the questions time asks art and life. Days crossed by the light and shadows of a city where nothing stops. At the end, an unpronounced name – and silence is the voice of a threat.

Written a few days before the elections in France, this text by Lionel Ruffel – essayist, researcher and professor of Literature at the University of Paris VIII – responds with emotion to the political situation of the crisis and the expectation it has engendered, in the country that gave rise to the new par excellence in the form of the Revolution.

Taking Borges’ famous short story ‘Funes, the Memorious’ as her starting point, Carla Ganito, a lecturer in the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Catholic University, Lisbon, analyses the complex dialectics between memory and forgetfulness in the digital age. She shows that the internet has brought a new but paradoxical condition that consists of making memories permanent, in taking away the right to be forgotten, at the same time as it transforms us into amnesiacs.

From leisure travel to the initiation of young nobles – under the title of the 'Grand Tour' – and today's mass tourism, the urban theorist Thierry Paquot creates and underscores a distinction on the basis of the idea that a tourist trip has nothing to do with the concept of travel and upholds that there is an urgent need to cut short the growing movement of global tourism.

From the elitist journeys in the old days to the democratised travels of mass tourism, there is a long history that has been mapped out here by a geographer who has traced the long-time phenomenon of tourism and accompanied the rise of trends and concepts that we often tend to regard as a creation of our times. Álvaro Domingues believes that the fundamental issue of tourism today is the game of global capital in urban geographies.

Tourism is the greatest social, anthropological and economic phenomenon of our times. Its impact on the lives of cities, changes in landscapes, and countries' and regions' cultures is so great that nothing remains intact wherever it goes. Regarded by some as a source of devastation that particularly affects historical city areas (but whose waves spread far beyond urban limits) and regarded by others as the achievement of the most positive interests and the highest ideals, tourism today is a subject of debate, controversy and urban conflict. By choosing it as the central theme of this number of Electra, we wish to treat it as a complex phenomenon that invites a wide variety of analyses by different disciplines and raises varying ideological viewpoints.

Tourism is also a discourse with its must-see commonplaces. A journey, in its most common sense, could be guided by the following references, in alphabetical order.

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.

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.

A person reaches their destination after a long journey and comes across an obstacle. Standing exactly between this person and their becoming, an enormous rock mass, heavy as lead, a skyscraper. It is unsurpassable. The only way to overcome is to summon the prefix trans-, the one that catapults, ignores borders and penetrates into obstacles. The harbinger of metamorphoses.