His immense work, which traverses a number of disciplines, gives good reason for this interview with Boris Groys. Moving in such areas as philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, art history and media theory, he has applied his vast erudition and his originality of thought to contemporary art, its system and its institutions. Born in 1947 in the former Democratic Republic of Germany, Boris Groys grew up in the Soviet Union, where he studied Mathematics, Logic and Linguistics. When he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1981, he brought with him a deep knowledge of the Russian vanguards and Soviet art. The relations between art and politics, and between the artist and society, are favoured by this former professor of the famous Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (1994–2009) who is now Global Distinguished Professor at the New York University.

In this issue of Electra, two ‘Books of Hours' chronicle the days leading up to Brazil’s presidential runoff election that caught the attention of the entire world. The authors are Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, writer, translator, and research director at Radio Novelo, born in the United States and based in Rio de Janeiro; and Rodrigo Nunes, a university professor in Brazil who holds a PhD from the University of London, with a vast, widely cited work on philosophy and political science. In this period of political uncertainty, apprehension and uneasiness, people lived every moment with a stressful and overwhelming intensity. These journals give us two different but complementing insights into everyday life and politics at the time of the clash between Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. And then there are the people, animals, books, films, and day-to-day acts that have become long-lasting symbols with each passing day.

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.

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’.

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.