The Empathic Movement

This book explores the newly founded Empathic Movement. The movement began in 2020, when noted artists were called upon by Menotti Lerro to sign the Empathic Manifesto, bringing their individual expressions of the “arts” together in a less individualistic way. They then started to help create a new cultural pole in southern Italy, giving life to the Contemporary Arts Centre, which founded the Poetry Village, the Village of Aphorisms, and the Cilento Poetry Prize, and shone light on a new cultural territory.

The book argues that the decentralization of culture gives voice to the silent masses, especially the peasant voices in the mountains, with a particular emphasis on intense and genuine emotion and feelings shared with others through the arts, rejecting individualism, social exclusion, and excessive competition between artists. The symbolic myth of the movement is called Unus: a semi-unknown god representing the Total Artist who was killed, torn to pieces, and thrown into the Alento river by his brothers, leading to the old separation of the arts.