Comfortable is used in the interrogative form: are you comfortable? The question never denotes an intimate relationship between those who ask and those who answer (in love, comfort does not help). Are you comfortable with the rules of the company, for example, or with something that I said that you might disapprove of? We ask in the affirmative about what we imagine might upset or offend. Are you comfortable with the place you are expected to occupy, instead of are you comfortable with the place you are not expected to leave? This bond is not horizontal, it is skewed. Those who ask are in the position to provide comfort or discomfort, a remnant of the power held by the feudal lord over the life and death of his serfs. Letting them live granted him automatic magnanimity.

A memory: in the 1980s, at the annual conference of American art historians, which in that particular year saw thousands of scholars gathering in the heart of Texas, a young ‘deconstructor’ after the Derrida model began his presentation without slides (used and abused by all the other speakers) and with the words, ‘No pictures, just concepts!’ The stunned audience shifted nervously in their seats.

The notion of democracy cannot be easily established nor fixed in a strict and rigorous manner. But, according to Paulo Tunhas, professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto and columnist of the Observador newspaper, there are a few conditions common to all so-called democratic regimes, without which they cease to be democratic. These conditions are named and defined in this text.

The verb to contaminate, from Latin contaminare (‘to deteriorate by mingling, to sully, to defile by touching’), lends itself to discursive resourcefulness producing a fair range of specific uses, from a particular action on food, water or the environment to politics or language and literary processes.

In one of his diaries, Kafka warned, ‘You don’t need to leave your room. Stay sitting at your desks and listen. You don’t even need to listen; just wait. You don’t need to wait; just stay still, silent, alone. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.’ The two diaries that we have published in this edition are by the photographer Daniel Blaufuks and the visual artist Mariana Silva. They are about the lockdown that has been imposed on us by the Covid-19 pandemic. They are based on two places on lockdown in a world held prisoner by the virus and fear: near Lisbon for him; New York for her. In these two ‘Books of Hours’, Blaufuks and Silva look at the world through a window that looks from outside in. But this window was not presented to them on a platter. They were the ones that opened it with a look that thinks, sees, speaks. Was it not also Kafka who said, ‘Man does not grow upwards, but from inside out.’?

The Italian sociologist Paolo Perulli, with an extensive body of work in urban development, logistics and territory, traces a genealogy and history of the ‘creatives’, who maintain a necessary link to large cities, but who, in their heterogeneity, can hardly be defined as an autonomous social group.

In this essay-feature, the musician, programmer and publisher Pedro Gomes talks to four artists associated with creole rap, who tell us stories from the neighbourhoods of the Greater Lisbon area and the South Bank. It also shows us the photos that the photographer Diogo Simões took for Electra. The encounter of words and pictures is accompanied by the rhythms of a music that has recently taken hold. This section also has the collaboration of Otávio Raposo with a brief history of Creole rap. ‘By registering their experiences living in marginalised territories and challenging the subordinate position occupied by the Afro-Portuguese in Portuguese society, these rappers forged a collective identity that served as a shelter in an environment marked by hostile conditions,’ we are told by the anthropologist.

‘By registering their experiences living in marginalised territories and challenging the subordinate position occupied by the Afro-Portuguese in Portuguese society, these rappers forged a collective identity that served as a shelter in an environment marked by hostile conditions,’ we are told by anthropologist Otávio Raposo in this brief history of Creole rap in Portugal. He refers to its artistic, cultural, political and social facets and the fact that this marginal, underground music has gained ground and popularity. ‘Neglected by record labels, radio and other hegemonic media, today Creole rap is one of the most vibrant music genres among Portuguese youth, mobilising artists and a legion of fans who use the new technologies of production and dissemination to acquire visibility’.

Biding our time means being able to extract from ourselves and the world the ideas, words and images that fix time in its defiant immutability and prolong its insolent mobility. This is why Parmenides, the master of being, and Heraclitus, the philosopher of the future, kept up a dialogue and a debate that Electra has been listening to attentively.

Traditional farming methods and the harmonious use of resources have been completely replaced in agriculture by techno-industrial mechanisms of intensive and accelerated production. Obedience to long timeframes, expansive space, and nature’s laws and caprices have become a luxury in today’s world. A minority obeys them still, and yet others uphold, without reservations, the benefits of an agricultural model that responds to the most modern criteria of speed and efficiency. In the interview below, three agricultural professionals offer their perspectives.