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New Manifesto
on the Arts

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It is time to build a worldview of beauty and harmony together. Empathy, feeling close to each other, as human beings and as artists.

The Empathic School

A literary-artistic-philosophical and cultural movement, born in italy in 2020

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The Empathic Movement: Empathy, Essence and Experience

Our millennium is entering its third decade, and it is time to build togethera vision of the world in the name of beauty and harmony. Interdisciplinarityand the idea of the “Total Artist” (a single person or a combination ofcontributions by people engaged in different cultural fields) proposed in theNew Manifesto on the Arts are proposed as a basis to grab the “fragmentarytruths” of this historical period that, never more than now, needs the figureof the artist as a guide. From 2019, the Contemporary Centre of the Arts isacting to this end, bringing many innovative artistic and cultural initiativesof great importance to the national territory and Cilento, animated by afundamental common feeling for empathy and feeling close to each other ashuman beings and as artists. For this reason, the Contemporary Centre ofthe Arts has established the School of Empathy, which exemplifies theeducational and formative purposes that distinguish it. From the triangle ofthe ancient area of Cilento (Vallo della Lucania, Omignano, Salento), newimpulses will be released for the development of the arts and culture throughthe emotions.

(Menotti Lerro)

Definition of the Movement
The Empathic School is a national literary, artistic, philosophical and cultural movement born in 2020 within the ‘New Cultural Triangle of the Ancient Cilento’, which is its epicentre: Omignano - ‘Land of Aphorisms’, Salento - ‘Land of Poetry’ and Vallo della Lucania - ‘Headquarters of the Contemporary Arts Centre’, which, starting from the values and ideas expressed in the ‘New Manifesto on the Arts’, places the empathic relationship and therefore the person in its ontic and ontological (intersubjective) constitution at the centre of its interests. It follows that any creative or didactic experimentation cannot disregard a process of identification with the other, with his cultural world and his contemporaneity as an opportunity to study and share knowledge and stories of inner life, epiphanies of the present time and past historical moments. This horizon of meaning implies a vocation for the territory and a civil promotion of society articulated by an individual and community growth according to ethical and value-based aims mediated by an aesthetic dimension: Art.
(Menotti Lerro, Luigi Leuzzi)
The pyramid and the cultural triangle of ancient Cilento
A cultural triangle encloses the magic of a territory, its genius loci, rich in myth, history, and traditions, the place of union between humanity and nature: Omignano, Village of Aphorisms; Salento, Village of Poetry; and Vallo della Lucania, Location of the Contemporary Centre of the Arts, which is the guardian of the artistic-literary values unveiled in the New Manifesto. This triangle fits ideally into the proportion and harmony of a quadrilateral that has a pyramidal apex on Monte Stella, whose gateway is Omignano, while its nodes are Paestum, Salento, Velia, and Palinuro. The projection of light from the star on the basic plan of Cilento coincides with the “Centre of the Arts.” The ancient pyramid reveals a pulsating soul.
(Menotti Lerro, Antonello Pelliccia)

Empathic School

The myth unveiled: "Unus and his brothers"

History

Desire and the search for wholeness are given the name love.

—Plato, Symposium

 

In the beginning was Unus, from supreme Zeus and from mortal woman born. Statuesque the body, adorned with majestic paintings, in the new sun of each day changed. Music the soul, in verse the word; among men without steps but of dance. Demigod!  

Like milk the spirit, absolute happiness. He sought no carnal acts, self-satisfied. But - perpetual return - the joys of one are thorns in others. Marvellous to behold, soon he was hated by his half-brothers of immortal armour and ready vengeance, Hera's sufferings, mother bent on the royal libertine's blatant betrayals of subtle tricks. Thus, instigated by Her, the lawful decided to dismember - by one hand the number of cloves - the unsuspecting Unus, on a vineyard thrown without force to spare, and then in the noble waters of the Alento finish him off, already decomposing every fibre to be essence: dance, poetry, music, sculpture and painting, ready to incarnate, divided, in the chosen creatures of the world. 

Moved by the Most High for the pierced beloved, Eros still commands, as for the androgynous figure: ‘Peace and love in every reunion between arts’, themselves elevating those within them and recreating the lost unity, that of the first Total Artist that envious gods, on the darkest day, wickedly decomposed.

Through the sharp as a dream mirror, Zeus fathered to the modern poet the shadowless light of Unus and his horror unveiled, denying even, in being there, the son of Abraham who had turned him away from men.

All the arts so far seek each other, like pulsating blood betrayed.


Menotti Lerro