Filtranisme

In the mid-1980s, adopted by the French capital, some Italian artists, such as Joseph Pace and Pablo Maria Landi,  critically retraced the intellectual experience of their country of origin, Italy of the 1970s/1980s.

The shared experience and the research for personal redemption give life to an artistic and philosophical sensibility of which Joseph Pace, doctor Jean-Marc Mayenga and Pablo Maria Landi are the highest Parisian expression. On the Rive Gauche, at the Café de Flore, the meeting place of the three intellectuals, a debate develops from which emerges the need to bring man back to the centre of the universe as well as to the basis of existentialism and the Palo Alto School, made known through Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze and Gregory Bateson. Filtranisme recognizes that man has the possibility of regaining the ability to be autonomous from life experience thanks to the intellectual and artistic capacity to be able to act as a universal filter, thus dropping the sediments that constitute our personality and, at the same time, highlighting the parts of a life that must always be reinterpreted by placing ourselves as a catalytic center. (Essay by Emanuel von Lauenstein Massarani, 2024).

Le filtranisme, filterism, is an artistic and philosophical neo-existentialist movement born in France in the mid-1980s. The word filter comes from the Latin filtrum and the French filtre. The first manifesto was published at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris and at the Sorbonne University of Paris on July 1987. Filtranism key figures are Joseph Pace, doctor Jean-Marc Mayenga, and the poet Pablo Maria Landi.

Filtranisme is an analytical philosophy of existence. It is based on moral self-discipline. Joseph Pace is the leading figure of the movement. As was for the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the filtranisme also is artistically expressed through the work by Joseph Pace.

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 filtranisme.