A Research-co-Creation of Care: Feminist Speculation, Collaboration, and Curation in the Decameron 2.0 Virtual Gallery

This paper presents the evolving work of the Decameron Collective, a group of women Canadian scholars and artists who, during the early COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022), built a body of creative works as an interactive, virtual gallery of visual, audio, and textual media inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353). More than a gloss on Boccaccio’s text, Decameron 2.0 is a feminist project of collaborative and curational worldbuilding. We describe our practice of co-creating and curating, making a case for interdisciplinary praxis-led approaches of research-creation that embody both a mode of inquiry and a practice of feminist ethics and care. We describe the world of Decameron 2.0 – its courtyards, caves, and rooms of spells, and the affordances of the webGL spatial navigation that contributes to the intermediality within and between the works. The intertextual spatialization of works in Decameron 2.0 and the non-linear exploratory affordances of the virtual environment extend into our academic thinking/theorizing through centripetal and centrifugal frames. In homage to the polyphony of mediaeval manuscript culture, and as an intervention against the flattening of so much academic discourse, we use illustrations, hyperlinks, margins, page layout, and metacommentary. This paratextuality illustrates what we call thinking-together and honours the differences among our individual voices and perspectives. This paper contributes to current critical and cultural understandings of making, care, communication, and feminist practice and models how multi-institutional collaboration can be reshaped in the era of and after COVID-19.