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 pandemic. Through the mail, each anonymous participant signed up to receive a few pages, chose one, and redacted the story’s original text. What was left on the page revealed a poem. After making their poem, participants mailed their remaining pages on to someone else who repeated the process, and kept the project moving.
Like a virus, The UNPRECEDENTED Project spread by word of mouth.
Part mail art, part public humanities initiative, pages moved through social circles both intimate and distant. These first participants served as origin points. They made accidental contact with the project, then helped it spread. Eventually, pages traversed 24 U.S. states and 14 countries. UNPRECEDENTED’s network of “page-passers” sustained the project for three years.
People initially discovered the experiment by finding an instructional QR code in the wild—maybe a sticker on a telephone pole, or tacked to a cafe bulletin board. Others joined through social media, classroom presentations, or public workshops. And some simply received a strange red envelope in the mail, postmarked from an anonymous sender — likely also quarantined elsewhere in the world.
