Urban Miscellanea
2020-2022, 2025
Urban Miscellanea is an experimental multimedia anthology that celebrates creativity situated within the urban.
2020/21: States of Apprehension
2021/22: Urban emergency / urban rhythms
2025: Archiving
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Lia Mazzari and Ben Parry2020/21
DECAMERON-19, dispatches from the isolated city
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Bio
Lia Mazzari’s practice as a sound artist is often collaborative, engaging new audiences through encounters with art in non-conventional spaces. She creates recorded and live events that embrace the broader sense of sound in space. This fluid relationship with her immediate environment, towards a sonic activism through the means of performance, composition, installation, and urban intervention forms the crux of her practice.
Dr Ben Parry is an artist, curator, and practice-led researcher based in London. Working internationally, his projects employ a wide range of mediums including film, photography, light, sound, and machines. His research and practice explores the intersections of art intervention, urbanism and activism, and the self-organising systems of the user-generated city.
DECAMERON-19, dispatches from the isolated city is a transnational collaboration of 100 stories from cities around the world as cultural responses to living through the pandemic.
The project draws inspiration from the literature of plague, in particular Boccaccio’s Decameron in which ten characters tell stories of isolation from the Black Death of 1348 in an empty villa outside Florence. By contrast Decameron-19 begins in the street, at the global scale with a network of artists from diverse cities experiencing differing states of lockdown, policy measures and economic responses.
Decameron-19 is about imagining our worlds differently through the act of making and as an embodied response to the unique spatial, psychological, social and political conditions we find ourselves in. It seeks to generate dialogue about the future life of cities, by leading practitioners who work with the specificity of their respective practices, local contexts and conditions of lockdown.
Reviving a culture of solidarity, each project shares visions of life under Covid-19 and how we can reclaim the space of the city as site for democratic process and the imagining of alternatives. Solidarity is expressed through the project’s unique methodology of producing weekly scores.
Contributing artists:
Anja Dimitrijecic; Laura Santini; Mathieu Tremblin, Cynthia Montier; Peter McCaughey; Sharmila Sarmant; Igor Ponosov; Zara Joan Miller; @xcrswx (Crystabel Riley & Seymour Wright); Deana Kolenčíková; Ben Parry; Lia Mazzari; Epos 257; Encastrable; Jonathan Naas; Arzhel Prioul; Marianne Villière; Aïda Gomez; Lucie Freynhagen, Robert Luzar, et al.
Concept & Curation: Lia Mazzari & Ben Parry