Editorial
Gazing at Time
José Manuel dos Santos and António Soares
Metropolitan
Destruction
André Tavares
Figure
Proust and Money
Michel Erman
Portfolio
5 houses for Mars – search+
Michael Morris
In the first person
Elisabeth Lebovici
Interview by António Guerreiro
View of Delft
Kinshasa: Holes, Mountains, Towers Filip De Boeck
Passages
I would believe only in a God
who could dance.
Jeremy Gilbert
Register
A biennial that finished but never ended Cristiana Tejo
Book of hours
Notes on Der Diktator
Rafael R. Villalobos
Subject
Forever young, Youth – Eternal and Fleeting
António Guerreiro
Teenage
Jon Savage
What is our responsibility for future generations?
Remo Bodei
Splendour in the Grass
Daniel Jonas
Jeunesse française
Matilde Castro Mendes
Pasolini and the possibility of exceeding power
Vinícius Nicastro Honesko
Everyone is totally guilty
No exceptions
António Pedro Marques
The cinematic production of life
José Bragança de Miranda Young people as witnesses
André Martins, Pedro Florêncio, Maria José Sbrancia, Flávio Gonçalves, Madalena Fragoso
Chosen Works
Poetry and politics
António Guerreiro
We, (all) women’, will it exist?
Marta Lança
Dictionary of received ideas Concept
Yves Michaud
Youth – both in its eternal and ephemeral forms – is the central theme to the fifth issue of Electra magazine. At the start of this press file, we read that “the real situation young people face today is at odds with the extremely high value attributed to the idea of youth in the market of aesthetical and social principles. On the one hand, young people are, in some respects, a dilapidated generation; on the other, only they are capable of keeping up with the times, which have accelerated at a dizzying pace”.
In this section, English writer and filmmaker Jon Savage describes the history of youth culture; poet and teacher Daniel Jonas writes, using two examples from cinematography, about his own experience of dealing with young people of school age; Italian philosopher Remo Bodei reflects on the generational fracture which defines our historical setting; professor Vinícius Nicastro Honesko writes about Pier Paolo Pasolini and his intellectual relationship with the young students who took part in the 1968 protests; editor António Pedro Marques tells of his experience as a young man living in “the last Lisbon suburb”; researcher and professor José Bragança de Miranda addresses the representation and mythology of youth and old age; teacher Matilde Castro Mendes recounts her relationship with her young students in a high school in the outskirts of Paris. Also within the same subject, five young people (Pedro Florêncio, Madalena Fragoso, Flávio Gonçalves, André Martins, Maria José Sbrancia) talk about themselves and the world through their personal experiences.
This issue’s portfolio is by architect Michael Morris and the SEArch+ studio. Bearing the title is 5 Houses for Mars, it gathers projects for space habitat developed in partnership with NASA throughout the last decade.
The interviewee is art historian and critic Elisabeth Lebovici. Author of important studies on contemporary artists and the book Ce que le sida m’a fait (winner of the Pierre Daix prize), which bears witness to the impact AIDS had on the art world and to the actions against the way in which institutions dealt with the illness, both central subject matters in this interview.
In the present edition, professor and essayist Jeremy Gilbert comments on a provocative quote by Friedrich Nietzsche; French writer and philosopher Michel Erman tells us about Marcel Proust’s relationship with money and what it represented in his life and work; architect and curator André Tavares addresses the rehabilitation and destruction work being carried out in the historical centres of Lisbon and Porto; curator and researcher Cristiana Tejo evokes and comments on the only edition of São Paulo’s Latin-American Art Biennale to ever take place, in 1978; Belgian anthropologist and curator Filip De Boeck describes the city of Kinshasa using two metaphorical elements: the hole and the mountain; and philosopher Yves Michaud writes about the word “concept”.
In the section “Selected Works”, António Guerreiro writes about the political side of Manuel Gusmão’s poetry, and Marta Lança addresses the question of gender and racial identity from the perspective of bell hooks’s book, Ain’t I a Woman?
This fifth Electra edition also includes a journal by theatre and opera director Rafael R. Villalobos, where he reflects and writes about his life and work, asserting an artistic, cultural and political conscience.
Electra is a magazine published by EDP Foundation. It consists of two editions, one in Portuguese and one in English, which include criticism, research, essays and cultural, social and political reflection. It addresses all cultural areas.
