The project drew inspiration from the literature of plague, in particular Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, in which ten characters, sheltering in an empty villa outside Florence, tell each other stories whilst in isolation from the Black Death of 1348. DECAMERON-19, by contrast, played out in the digital present, physically and virtually, in our streets and public spaces, under open skies and in cyber-space.

A network of artists from cities across the globe, many of whom were initially strangers to each other, met weekly, virtually, to narrate stories lived, retold and performed through the project’s methodology of exchanging scores.

Each contributor, in turn, wrote and presented a score which then became a tool for exploring the edges of shared, and separate, space. The embodied and situated responses, reflected the common and the unique spatial, psychological, social and political conditions people found themselves in during the Covid-19 lockdown.

By interpreting the same score in different contexts, Decameronistas mapped their localities, and exchanged their experience of making work in differing states of lockdown, restrictive policy measures and economic constraints. The emergent work, and the emergent colleagueship and friendship, sustained the group. The weekly conversations connected different perspectives, and mapped the present, exploring the role of art in finding resource currently, and in imagined futures. The result was the co-production of new knowledge about the nature of living through multidimensional crises.

Like Boccaccio’s novel, the emerging work provided a document of sorts of life during the pandemic. His was written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, this account was written in the individual poetic visions, ritual inventions, weird fictions, unexpected narratives and humorous political critiques of makers, artists, musicians and others, employing their creativity in transdisciplinary conversations.