Filtranisme Movement

Le filtranisme (filterism) is an avant-guarde neo-existentialist artistic and philosophical movement that originates in the mid-’80s in Paris. The first manifesto was published at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris July 1987. The word filter comes from the Latin filtrum and the French filtre. Its key figures are Joseph Pace, doctor Jean-Marc Mayenga, and the poet Pablo Maria Landi.

For Joseph Pace, “the individual is determinated by nature as well as by society”. Noting that: “Cultural, historical, social and visual filters underlie each individual and determine his existence. To live, therefore, we all must receive something from outside. This is a need that we cannot satisfy alone. And our brain activities are consistent with the cultural and visual information we receive.”

Art therefore refers to culture, but culture in turn refers to society. Individuals, therefore, think, are influenced and live through a constantly changing reality and through a process of continuous balance and homeostasis.

Explaining: “To live, man must constantly filter air, water, food, as well as politics, economics, love. Filtranisme is therefore a philosophy of balance and homeostasis based on the compartmental model and according to which “man is a membrane”.

Filtranism arises from the awareness that the individual acts, thinks and lives within partially crystallized models, which are indeed the result of the interaction of the man, but which, in relation to the individual, acquire an independent reality which pre-exists and conditions him in all aspects of his existence.

Noting that: “The fact of filtering depicts the universalization of the unconscious thought made up of the impulses of unconscious heroes. What all living beings therefore have in common is the fundamental and transcendent fact that the capacity to filter, the attitude of being a filter, precedes essence.”

Intellectuals and artists such as Emanoel Araujo, Jacques Garelli, Mariastella Margozzi, Matilde Amaturo, Lara Anniboletti, Umberto Pappalardo, Kurt Heinrich Wolff, Emanuel von Lauenstein Massarani, Albert Russo, Alberto Izzo, Pino Procopio, have all been intrested on filtranisme.