A large site-specific canvas with a rainbow backdrop installed in the Cortile Maggiore of Palazzo Ducale, created by one of the key figures of the beat generation and the New York avant-garde: it is We gave a party for the gods and the gods all came by John Giorno, and kicks off, Thursday 10 June at 7.30 pm, the 2021 season of Electropark, the electronic music festival in Genoa that combines performing arts with cultural innovation. Scheduled from 10 to 13 June, Electropark 2021 sees ten national and international artists protagonists of six DJ sets, four installations, three tastings, a reading and a talk between Palazzo Ducale, the Darsena, Prè and the Sestiere del Molo.

John Giorno's work, who passed away in 2019, is installed in the main courtyard of the Doge's Palace in collaboration with the “Parole spalancate” International Poetry Festival and is produced by Apalazzogallery (Brescia) and the John Giorno Foundation of New York. A work of great impact, with rainbow tones, to recall the importance of diversity in the cultural growth of modern society. LGBTQ + activist, John Giorno was also the subject of Andy Warhol's 1963 film Sleep and one of the most active figures of the Beat Generation, close to Pop Art artists such as Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as Andy Warhol. Among his most famous projects, which led the public towards new forms of literary experimentation, there is the Dial-A-Poem of 1969, with which you could listen to poems on the phone, read by artists such as William Burroughs, John Ashbery , Ted Berrigan, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Robert Rauschenberg. Like many American intellectuals of the seventies, Giorno participated in that political sentiment that protested against the war in Vietnam and was very fascinated by Buddhism, especially following a trip to India, so much so that he became one of the first Western students of Tibetan Buddhism, contributing to the diffusion of the precepts in the United States and bringing this knowledge also into poetry.