We hear a lot these days about a ‘decline’ or even a ‘crisis’ in political parties. In most Western democracies, parties have less and less members. Even mere ‘party identification’ − voters’ emotional and psychological closeness to a given party − has waned. At the same time, ‘electoral volatility’ − the proportion of voters who change behaviour between elections – has been growing, as might be expected.

Almost sixty years ago, Italian director Florestano Vancini, in the film Le stagioni del nostro amore [The Seasons of Our Love] (1966), caught the first signs of an epochal collective disillusionment with extraordinary timing. In the film, the protagonist – a mature and now disenchanted left-wing intellectual – returned to his hometown, where he had participated in the Resistance twenty years earlier. Having become an important journalist and leaving the party, he visited his old comrades in the struggle. But, little by little, he realised that the personal and political crisis he was going through was actually a crisis of an entire world.

The ‘Anthropocene event’ has put geology and a few geologists centre stage, but conflicts arose within this scientific realm that sometimes had little to do with science. The geologist and palaeontologist Jan Zalasiewicz, emeritus professor at the University of Leicester, interviewed here, is a well‑known scientist. Responding to the decision made by a subcommission of the International Union of Geological Sciences, he made the point that, based on current research, there is undisputable scientific evidence that supports the concept that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch. The atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen called this epoch the ‘Anthropocene’.

In this ‘View of Delft’, novelist and essayist Daniel Saldaña París writes about New York, the city where he currently lives, dividing himself between this city and his native Mexico City. In this account, there is at the same time both closeness and distance, coming from a gaze that travels from the outside, becoming interior and even intimate in the discovery he makes of this fascinating North American city, comparing it with other cities and evoking everything about it that he has read, seen and lived.

In this ‘Book of Hours’, Lise de la Salle talks of her profession as a pianist, sharing her daily intimacy with music and reflecting on what it means to her. Born in France, this pianist, who has been honoured with the most distinguished awards for her performances and recordings, has played with prestigious orchestras and eminent conductors such as Lorin Maazel, Sir Neville Marriner and Sir Charles Mackerras. Speaking of her concerts, she says, ‘All those hours of hard work, doubts, impatience and questions make sense at that precise moment of absolute communication with my audience.’

Isabella Ducrot is an artist, writer and collector, in whose work fabrics play a key, even foundational role. These fabrics, which have distant or near origins in both time and space, are the bearers of memory, variety, originality and truth. At the age of 94, her artistic recognition and international media acclaim continue to grow. In her studio, located in the magnificent Palazzo Dora Pamphilj, she continues to work, a modern Penelope who weaves but does not need to undo her work in order for it to become infinite. It is against this backdrop of a new ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ that this conversation on behalf of Electra takes place. Isabella Ducrot talks to Leander Gussmann and Nora Iosia, the person in charge of her studio, in a tone in which the intimacy of her voice reaches us with the same subtlety as the intimacy of her highly creative work, which we also have the privilege of showing in this ‘Portfolio’.

On the 500th anniversary of Luis de Camões’ (debatable) year of birth, José Augusto Bernardes, at the invitation of Electra, writes about the life and work of this great Portuguese poet, and about the politics of memory, the teaching of Camões works and his contribution to the modern idea of literature. This professor and researcher coordinated the Inter-University Centre for Camonian Studies and was the director of the General Library at the University of Coimbra. He is the Commissioner-General of the Commemorations of the V Centenary of the Birth of Luis de Camões, and has published a vast body of work on authors and literary themes, particularly from the 16th century, the Portuguese ‘golden age’.

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.

If words were tangible objects, ‘innovation’ would be an object of indefinite shape, made of ordinary plastic. Something that is everywhere: in the wind, stuck to the ground, floating around on endless islands in the middle of the ocean. Swirling in the Earth’s orbit; embedded in our lungs, flowing in tiny particles in our blood. A shapeless, colourless thing that, through a quantum leap of some uncertain alchemy, can take on any configuration, any colour.

Drawing on a famous quote from Flaubert’s correspondence, which served as Marguerite Yourcenar’s catalyst for Memoirs of Hadrian, Benedikt Eckhardt, a German historian, classics professor, and author of a vast and renowned body of work, clarifies what we currently know about a past that does not pass and resonates in our present.