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).

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.’