Authors
Itamar Kubovy (producer), Joe Szuecs (engineer), Juan Diaz Bohorquez (designer), Sherry Huss (community builder), and Stefanie Sobelle (producer).
Files
Download Full Text (576 KB)
Document Type
Art Catalog
Description
In Boccaccio’s 14th-century work Decameron, a group of friends avert the loneliness of a quarantine during the Black Death by squatting together in an abandoned villa outside of Florence and telling each other stories: 10 people x 10 days = 100 tales. Their stories give them solace (and a bit of bawdy fun).
When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, we were inspired by Boccaccio’s belief that sharing stories is a salve for isolation, but we were a group of friends separated from one another by space and time. We could not squat together in a Florentine villa like Boccaccio’s characters, but we did find that looking in on each other’s lives through the contemporary technologies of our screens was essential for our mental health. So in March of 2020, we started sending requests to people we missed to send us short, intimate video postcards of their experiences in lockdown. We loved the videos that arrived, and we would play them over and over.
We began wondering, what could a Decameron look like in the 21st century? How could we “squat” together with people from all over the world in one neighborhood, in which everyone could share their stories? We imagined an idiosyncratic, virtual place, where the curious could click on a window and peek into each others’ lives, much like we had already been doing with one another. We began reaching out further afield, inviting artists from around the world to participate in our experiment. We were deliberate about diversity and geographic variety, but we chose to be guided more by intuition, the generosity of others, and happy accidents than by curatorial intention.
Publication Date
Fall 2022
Publisher
Schmucker Art Gallery, Gettysburg College
City
Gettysburg, PA
Keywords
COVID-19, fine arts, interactive art. digital art
Recommended Citation
Places, Imaginary, "Decameron Row, In Memoriam" (2022). Schmucker Art Catalogs. 40.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/40
Comments
Decameron Row was on exhibition at the Schmucker Art Gallery at Gettysburg College October 12th - November 12th, 2022.