The Brazilian curator and sociologist Cristiana Tejo describes and analyses the First Biennial of Latin-American Art in São Paulo, which was held in 1978. This one-off event was of great artistic, cultural, social and political importance, for one thing due to the controversy that it sparked. Some of its issues, questions and appeals are still current and productive today.
 

Each epoch has its needs, its problems, its desires, obsessions, and a vocabulary where all this polarizes.However, a difference marks these times of ours: never before have there been such powerful means of communicating and amplifying fetish words with ideological value.

Handbags, pencils, frozen food. As well as cars, shoes, chocolate and petrol. The universe of things that surrounds us seems not only to take the most disparate forms, but also has the most varied uses. One of the merits of Marx was that he showed us what unites these objects, despite their differences: the objects that surround us are, for the most part, artefacts, the embodiment of human labour, produced for the purpose of distribution, sale and consumption. They are, in fact, commodities. For Marx, unlike other proponents of classical economics, the fact of being the fruit of human labour does not determine a commodity’s capacity to embody an idea, a project, a vision. Objects are the material and visible incarnation of labour, and it is this that imbues them with something more: the ability to symbolise the social and economic divisions that made their creation possible.

If “at first sight” a commodity appears to be an obvious thing, analysis could be said to be a second way of looking at it, which frees it from the fallacy of an obvious, or self-evident (selbstverständlich) simplicity: that is to say it destroys that “selbst”, the pretext of autonomy, and reveals that it can be traced back to an accumulation of metaphysical and theological complications. 

With this piece, photographers and editors André Príncipe and José Pedro Cortes continue the series conceived for Electra, which began with Hisham Mayet, in Tangier, and continued with Youssef Rakha, in Cairo. This time, they spoke at length with the great French photographer Bernard Plossu, at his home in La Ciotat. Then they took a boat to the island of Corsica. In a conversation that became very intimate, they talked about life, travel, the passion for the desert, the passing of time, photography, photographers, photo books and also the work that Plossu has done in Portugal. At a certain point, Plossu commented: ‘And it's true, good photographers dance. And probably the closest art to photography is neither cinema nor literature, it's dance. A good photographer is graceful.’ Like dance and photography, this conversation is a way of giving people and things movement and light that take them beyond themselves.

The Brazilian essayist and novelist Silviano Santiago, a great specialist in the work of Guimarães Rosa, writes about the Portuguese edition of Grande Sertão: Veredas, an uncommon and ‘monstrous’ novel that has challenged generations of readers and scholars with an endless task. It is published in English under the title The Devil to Pay in the Backlands.

The exhibition Álvaro Lapa – O tempo todo [Álvaro Lapa – The whole time], curated by Miguel von Hafe Pérez at the Serralves Foundation, brings together over 300 works of art (from 1963 to 2005) to create the broadest retrospective of the artist held to date. With the inclusion of countless unseen pieces, its achievement is to give visibility to his extremely rich and complex painting, which sustains close links to literature, philosophy and politics.

At the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, curated by Helena de Freitas, a new exhibition places the work of Rui Chafes and Alberto Giacometti side by side and head to head. The magnetic force of attraction between the two bodies of work is clear to the viewer, in what brings them together and what keeps them apart. Nicolao Federico, writer, philosopher and curator, is familiar with the work of both Giacometti and Chafes and writes about the artists and the exhibition in which they come together.

Briton A. J. P. Taylor was one of the most influential and controversial historians of his time, with a fundamentally important oeuvre on the political and diplomatic history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a pioneer in the use of mass media to disseminate history to a wide audience. Kathleen Burk is a lecturer and researcher at the University of London and author of the biography Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor. She has penned a portrait of this intellectual figure, who left no-one indifferent, for this number of Electra. His work still sparks passions and controversy, often on a par with those caused by the events and personalities that he studied.

Giving time a number that we use to count and commemorate it, is seeking a continuity that connects the future to the past in this strange, usual place that we call the present. It also means approaching what anthropologists call a symbolic domain or perhaps even a magical order. As we draw closer, we touch that distance in which surrealists saw life and freedom coincide in the myth that eternalises the moment.