With the new media and social networks, the media landscape today has changed out of all recognition: the ground rules of the public domain have shifted completely, the old hierarchies have been overthrown, power has fragmented, whilst reality and unreality, not to say truth and untruth, are now interchangeable. Early hopes for a more transparent society have vanished and, instead, the world has become opaque. As things now stand, the press can no longer claim to be the Fourth Estate and what little power that still clings to it is fragile. The articles in this section set out to explore and understand where these and other issues may be taking us.

In Venice, the Bienniale becomes the centre of the world.The Cavalli Franchetti Palace, this year’s Portuguese pavillion, is currently inhabited by the vampires created by Pedro Neves Marques. It is on this narrative installation, wandering backwards and forwards through it, that this ‘Book of Hours’, with its evocations and meditations, science fiction and poetic reflections, is based. Non-binary, Pedro speaks of ‘a future where gestation will be decoupled from gender, and the categories of womanhood and manhood made irrelevant’. He adds: ‘Ecology, gender, anthropology, the embodiment of technologies into cosmotechnics, health and sexuality are all words that have been used, and that I too have used, to think my work.’

‘From the second half of the twentieth century, architecture became aware that the ground was also a territory for design. In the fifties, Pikionis’s delicate design for the Acropolis access in Athens taught architects to look down again, just like some premodern cultures had done when designing tiles and pavements.’ This essay written for Electra by Chilean architect, researcher and curator Francisco Díaz tells us about this return. His latest book, published this year, is actually entitled Suelos [Soils]. Taking the City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela as a case in point, he tells us about the relationship between soil and terrain. Grounded in various types of knowledge, Díaz's gaze at the same time questions, investigates, guesses, discovers, records and ponders.

Whoever is reading the words and seeing the images of this Editorial knows that they have arrived at them because their attention has been drawn to Electra, either in the present or in the past. In a world-event saturated with signs (linguistic, acoustic, visual) and icons, signifiers and constant flows of information, seductions and requests, calls and invitations, technological dependencies and media compulsions, the reader has had their attention fought over between Electra and many other things that every day, every hour, every minute, ask for, claim and demand their attention. By deciding to give their attention to our magazine, the reader has made a choice which represents willingness, time, disposition, interest, investment. This is when attention becomes tension, temptation, intention.

The most important Italian literary critic, Alfonso Berardinelli who gave a valuable interview in Electra 20, writes here about Italo Calvino, the great author who, guided by structuralism, took narrative, the short story and short forms to a supreme level of literary construction.

Interview with the French artist and writer Camille de Toledo where, on the topic of contemporary art, we talk about the cynicism of art, curators, the vagueness of ‘contemporary’, and above all, about the potential time that breaks with the blocked time of ‘presentism’, about potential art that rejects aesthetic ‘melancholism’ and the discourse of finitudes.

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.

‘Within the circle of scholars and experts, Gadda is considered a classic of the twentieth century, alongside giants of the international scene such as Proust, Musil, Joyce, Pessoa, Céline, Nabokov, or Beckett’, we are reminded. It is of the great writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, who was born in Milan in 1893 and died in Rome in 1973, as well as his labyrinthine and complex work and its reception that Lucca Mazzocchi writes. Professor at the Universities of Milan and Oxford, Mazzocchi is a specialist in Italian literature of the 20th century, having studied in particular the work of Gadda, an author who exists to be discovered.

An interview with Carlo Ginzburg in which the Italian historian speaks about his intellectual journey and the ‘situations’ and coincidences that have defined all his research and made him one of the world’s most important names in contemporary historiography. The conversation also touches on the circumstances in which he lived from childhood – at the heart of the flourishing literary and cultural scene of post-war Italy.

Interviewed by the journalist Alexandra Prado Coelho, the Brazilian sociologist Carlos Alberto Dória examines the phenomenon of the media’s elevation of food to the status of spectacle, a process which has turned chefs into the ‘stars’ of this world dominated by the codes of distinction that everyone aspires to. He also discusses the symbolic creation of ‘national dishes’ determined by historical, cultural and ideological factors.