Hisham Mayet is one of those figures capable of providing literature and cinema with characters that defy oblivion. Born in Libya and educated in the UK and the US, he makes the world a never-‑ending journey. Living between reality and its fiction – or between fiction and its reality – his memories, gestures, actions and works cover many times, spaces, changes and visions.

Filmmaker, photographer, editor, researcher, musician, writer, creator, adventurer, traveller and world citizen, he builds a life lived against the ordinary in everything that he says and does. His interests include art and politics, the self and the other, the internal and external, the past and future, the here and there.

In the week in question, Hisham was in Tangier. For this issue of Electra, the photographers and editors André Príncipe and José Pedro Cortes went there to meet him, to hear him recount his life, and then complemented that story with a visual essay. They spoke to the great conversationalist for hours and came to the conclusion that he was even more fascinating than they had imagined. This is an interview-portrait-feature attentively and eagerly carried out In the First Person. To read it is to hear a voice measured (and modulated) by many voices and to look at an image mixed (and crossed) with many images.

A city is also made of the intentions, desires, gestures and acts that fill it with other movement and cover it with different rhythms. To observe it in its streets and obstacles, to unveil it where it opens and closes up, to act performatively on the city is, at the same time, to confirm and transform it, to traverse and probe it, to surpass and transcend it, to preserve and disturb it. It is to impart an instability to its stability, an ephemerality to its continuity, a departure to its permanence, a metamorphosis to its form. Performance art is a praxis: we transform ourselves by transforming, we become what we are and what we are not. This is what preoccupies Ana Pais, a theatre critic, professor and researcher, and the editor of Performance in the Public Sphere.

Palaeoanthropology and ethology, two disciplines to which António Bracinha Vieira has devoted part of his work as a professor and researcher, provide important scientific matter with which to reflect on what unites us with and separates us from the other living beings that share the biosphere with us – as anthropocentrism and its dreams of omnipotence carry on as usual.

Massimo Filippi, a professor of neurology in Milan, is a distinguished anti-speciesism scholar (see, among other work, Questioni di specie, 2017) and a relentless critic of the strict separation of humans and animals, which, according to him, produces and legitimises the ‘crimes’ perpetrated against animals. His article can be read and compared with the one that follows it, by Vasco M. Barreto.
 

Vasco M. Barreto, a scientist and researcher at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Universidade Nova, Lisbon, discusses ‘speciesism’, a key concept for the animal rights movements. He demonstrates that it is based on fallacies, contradictions and lacunae, of which the work of the controversial Australian philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, is an example.

The territorial behaviours of birds and the political and creative analogies that they generate are the main focus of Vinciane Despret’s research. The Belgian philosopher of science, an important figure in Animal Studies, has discovered the importance of ethology in the course of her career.

The work of the Italian sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago includes a contentious book entitled Genocidi animali (2018). Written with two friends, Massimo Filippi and Antonio Volpe, the slim volume caused controversy for using the word ‘genocide’. This article, beginning with a biographical narrative, looks at the “history of philosophers’ indifference towards the animal world”.
 
 

The question of animal rights rests on a notion of politics that pushes it beyond its traditional limits. To think of and defend ‘animal politics’, which in its broadest sense amounts to ecopolitics, is the task to which the Bulgarian philosopher Boyan Manchev commits himself in this article, continuing his earlier work on ‘wild freedom’.

The writer, literary critic and literature professor Éric Marty – author of Bref séjour à    Jérusalem – recounts his wanderings around Tel Aviv. He focuses on the city’s modernity and cosmopolitanism, which endow Israel with a different face than the one revealed by Jerusalem.

All over the world, the preservation and nurture of cultural memory is becoming less and less important in terms of political priorities and public investment. Museums, monuments, archives and libraries are pitted against the vibrancy of constantly changing new technologies; and the conviction is spreading that planning for the future must be at the cost of a gradual marginalisation of the past, which is seen as a passive burden, rather than an active force, a reserve of cultural and moral energy to draw on.