Filtranisme – Art and Philosophy of Human Filters

The word filtranisme comes from the Latin filtrum and the French filtre. The first manifesto was published at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris and presented at the Sorbonne University of Paris on July 1987. Filtranisme key figures are Joseph Pace, doctor Jean-Marc Mayenga, and the poet Pablo Maria Landi.

Born outside the dynamics of collective movements, that characterized the second half of the twentieth century, Filtranism affirms the centrality of the individual as a unique and irriducible experience, exploring the relationship between freedom, identity, perception and society.

“Rooted on two core concepts of French existentialism—freedom and anguish—Filtranisme maintains that the starting point of philosophical thought should be the individual’s experience. Like the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, and Albert Camus, Filtranism also find its artistic expression through the Joseph Pace’s work.” —Mariastella Margozzi

However, filtranisme maintains a critical relationship with the existentialist tradition, adopting its focus on individual experience, freedom, and the conditioning of existence. Its theoretical distinctiveness lies in the concept of the filter—understood as a fundamental process through which the individual engages with biological, cultural, and social reality. By employing the model of a membrane and referencing the concept of homeostasis, filtranism interprets existence as a continuous exchange between the individual and their environment; within this process, the subject is conditioned by pre-existing structures while simultaneously participating actively in their ongoing reconstruction.

For Joseph Pace, “the man is crossed by the nature as well as by the society”. Noting that: “Cultural, historical, social and visual filters underlie each individual and determine their existence. To live we must all 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 this in turn refers to society. Individuals, therefore, think, influence 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. It 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 men, but which, in relation to the individual, acquire an independent reality which gives him pre-exists and which conditions it in all aspects of its 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 Kurt Heinrich Wolff, Jacques Garelli, Emanoel Araujo, Mariastella Margozzi, Emanuel von Lauenstein Massarani, Matilde Amaturo, Albert Russo, Lara Anniboletti, Alberto Izzo and Pino Procopio, have all been intrested on Filtranism.