Electra, Issue 9 – Speed

Electra is an international periodical dedicated to all areas of culture, promoting dialogue between different artistic disciplines, humanistic knowledge and science, cultural theories and practices.

In this issue:
Issue 9 marks the second anniversary of Electra magazine. “Speed has changed and determined everything: politics and communication, the economy and society, science and cybernetics, art and love, food and sleep, sickness and health, life and death”, one may read in the magazine’s editorial. This dossier includes the collaboration of renowned authors whose works have been permeated by the theme of Speed as a topic that inspires analysis and reflection: François Hartog, Frédéric Neyrat, Yves Citton, Laurent de Sutter, Federico Leoni, Aurélien Barrau, António Guerreiro and João Pacheco.

The section “In the First Person” offers an interview with Vandana Shiva, one of the most well-known environmental activists of our time.

The German artist Stefan Kürten is the author of the Portfolio, with the title Pink Turns to Blue, accompanied by an essay by curator and critic Gregor Jansen, which speaks of the inspiration which Kürten’s work finds in cinema and the strange relationship between architecture, innocence and terror.

“Should ethical or political reasons be able to restrict literary and artistic works?” is the question that provides the theme to the section “Diagonal”. This question, raised by the controversy surrounding the fact that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Peter Handke, is answered by João Barrento, essayist and translator, and Michel Surya, writer and director of the French journal Lignes.

In this ninth edition of Electra, painter João Queiroz comments on the words written by painter Paul Gauguin; Gorbachev is the central character in an article by William Taubman, which draws a picture of a “tragic hero”; Brazilian essayist and novelist Silviano Santiago, a specialist in the work of Guimarães Rosa, writes about the Portuguese edition of Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands).