In 1353, in the wake of the Black Death, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron. In it, ten fictional people—seven women and three men—hid away in an Italian villa and waited out the plague. They passed the time by telling stories. One-hundred stories, to be exact, over the course of ten long days.
The UNPRECEDENTED Project was a public poetry experiment that circulated pages of The Decameron between strangers during the COVID-19 quarantine. Each participant signed up to receive a few book pages in the mail, chose one, and redacted or blacked out the story’s original text. What was left on the page revealed a poem. Then, participants passed their remaining pages onto someone else to repeat the process.
From 2020-2022, the entirety of Boccaccio’s 800-page book was returned — deconstructed, reconstructed, and modernized in the form of erasure poetry. Pages spread across 14 countries. Geolocated and plotted on a digital map, each page can be traced back to its own network of feelings.
Like its literary inspiration, The UNPRECEDENTED Project was born of a pandemic. Many of these poems reflect on the solitude, urgency, travesty, and strange beauty that has become a thing of the past. Or has it?
The UNPRECEDENTED Project is now an artifact. The collection lives in this gallery.
participate.
Click here and sign up to receive physical pages of The Decameron in the mail. Create your poem, then send it back. Pass on the remaining pages to someone you love. All poems will be contributed to UNPRECEDENTED’s ongoing collection.
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