‘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.

One of the most prominent philosophers of the twenty-first century and arguably the one most engaged with the issue of change in the world today, Catherine Malabou has covered the most disparate topics in contemporary critical thought, from neuroscience to feminism, from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency, from epigenetic trauma to sexual pleasure. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Catherine Malabou recalls the journey that culminated in her new book on the political idea of anarchism, the latest variation on the concept that brings together her entire work: plasticity.

(Definition 1: slow march)

How do you bring overused words back into the world? Among countless hypotheses, let us think of the punch of two other words: seduction and courage. The beguiling challenge – and to accept it, you must be naive and susceptible to seduction. Or the brave, clear-headed creature that chooses the obstacle, the enemy.

Taking as his starting point a classic quote from Charles Péguy, author Christian Salmon, who was Milan Kundera’s assistant, reflects with great originality on the relationship between our current times and Greek antiquity, bearing in mind the ‘nostalgia for the ancients and the post-modern appetite for heroes and stories’.

From a very early age till late in life, Churchill wrote in order to speak of the world, the United Kingdom, and himself. On one occasion, he declared that history would be generous to him, because he was going to write it. When the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the great victor in the Second World War, it brought attention to a literary oeuvre that is indispensable to an understanding of the man and the audacity of his deeds. Drawing on the “old lion’s” own books and those that many authors have written about him, the diplomat and historian Bernardo Futscher Pereira provides us with another portrait of Winston Churchill.

At a time when it has become evident that the scale of large cities makes them fragile in all areas, especially when facing an invisible virus,Thierry Paquot, author of Mesure et démesure des villes [Moderation and Excess in Cities], as well as other books on issues of contemporary urbanism, opposes the concept of the bioregion to the increasingly numerous megalopolises and the various forms of urban disaster with which we are confronted today.

Examining the city today with its metamorphoses and aggravated manifestations, such as its most eloquent sign, the megalopolis – which some see as decline and others as a mark of huge vitality – is an exercise that places us on terrain exposed to every aspect of political, social and cultural life. The city is a theme of huge and impressive scope. In the age we live in, there is a particular appeal for an acceleration of the urban phenomenon and the unlimited expansion of the city alongside, and based on the same logic as, the total emptying of the countryside, which is the other side of a dichotomy that seemed epitomised by literary depictions and a relic-filled imaginary. However, certain current conditions and circumstances – the pandemic, the possibilities for digital nomadism, the gentrification of an ever-broader urban swathe and the economic logic that reserves the city for the wealthy and visitors – have brought the countryside to a place where only the city once seemed to exist. Thus, the classic dichotomy has been revived at a time when the environmental mayhem caused by climate change is forcing us to re-examine the city and the countryside as a whole and not in the polarised terms that modernism has encouraged.

In this dossier ‘City, Countryside’,
we present images from two artists. Thomas Struth is one of the most internationally recognised German photographers. Among his most well-known series of work is one about city streets that may be summarised in a single photograph: Unconscious Places. It is from this series that Struth has chosen the images for
this ‘Subject’ section of Electra.
With a body of work of great originality, the Portuguese painter João Hogan obsessively painted the vastness and harshness of the landscape, its aridity and its silence, often giving his paintings a metaphysical resonance. Some of these images are shown in this dossier.
What these photographs by Struth and paintings by Hogan have in common is the absence of people, thus offering the viewer a contemplation that better reveals the structural elements of the City and the Countryside.

The eminent British art historian and critic Claire Bishop, renowned as one of the leading theorists of the idea of participation in the visual arts and in performance, is about to launch a new book on the problem of attention in contemporary culture over the last thirty years. In conversation with Electra, this professor at City University of New York discusses exhibitions, installations, criticism and dance, exploring the radical ways in which digital technology has been transforming the idea of the spectator.