Decameron Row
Concept, design and co-curation: Juan Diaz Bohorquez
A collaborative project with Itamar Kubovy, Stefanie Sobelle, Joe Szuecs and Sherry Huss.
Production: Imaginary Places
Decameron Row is an experiment in community. We’ve been deliberate about diversity and geographic variety, but we’ve chosen to be guided more by intuition, the generosity of others, and happy accidents than by curatorial intention. The result is a quirky and incomplete record of this strange time. We hope you find it diverting. New videos will be added weekly through the summer until all the windows are occupied.
“This community is, in one sense, a fantasy: the Chilean musician next door to the Israeli writer next door to the Thai filmmaker. But in another sense, it’s real, and not all the windows are lighted yet, and more artists move in every week.”
In Boccaccio’s 14th-century Decameron, a group of friends avert the loneliness of quarantine during the Black Death by squatting together in an abandoned villa outside of Florence and telling each other stories — 10 people, 10 days, 100 tales. Their stories gave them solace. Since in this moment, global community cannot meet under one roof for comfort and insight, we wondered, how could we gather people from all over the world into one neighborhood, onto one street, where they could share their disparate responses? In this idiosyncratic, virtual place, the curious could click on a window and peek into each others’ lives, much like we had already been doing with one another.
