John Giorno: The Performative Word

Poet and magnetic performer, John Giorno (New York, 1936–New York, 2019) transformed the spoken and written word into an art form. From February 5 to May 3, 2026, MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, part of the Civic Museums Department of the Municipality of Bologna, dedicates John Giorno: The Performative Word to him. Curated by Lorenzo Balbi, the exhibition is the first major institutional retrospective devoted to Giorno, staged in the Sala delle Ciminiere, and celebrates one of the most radical and visionary protagonists of contemporary culture.

A key figure in avant-garde New York, poet, artist, and activist John Giorno broke down disciplinary boundaries, turning poetry into a living body, a gesture capable of inhabiting unexpected places. His friendships and collaborations with some of the most significant figures of those years—including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, William Burroughs, John Cage, and Patti Smith—and the founding, in 1965, of Giorno Poetry Systems, the non-profit platform that revolutionized the circulation of poetry by intertwining it with music, visual arts, political engagement, and community practices, testify to Giorno’s essential impact on the history of art.

The exhibition retraces John Giorno’s multifaceted practice through several groups of works, showing how the artist enhanced poetic language in its plastic, relational, and performative dimensions, pushing the word beyond itself into the realm of the visual arts and telecommunications networks. Much of his artistic production reuses excerpts from his poems, replicated across different supports, with the use of carefully selected colors and an iconic font created specifically for the artist by Mark Michaelson.

At the heart of the exhibition is Dial-A-Poem, the iconic interactive work through which the artist made available to the public, via a telephone number to dial, recordings of the voices of poets, artists, musicians, and activists reading their own compositions. The pioneering project, which transformed the telephone into a tool for the large-scale dissemination of poetry, was originally produced in 1969 and subsequently presented in 1970 in the exhibition Information at MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work became an emblematic example of participatory conceptual art, expanding over the years to include 282 recordings by 132 authors, among them Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka, and generating international editions in several countries, such as Dial-A-Poem France, Dial-A-Poem Mexico, Dial-A-Poem Brazil, Dial-A-Poem Thailand, and Dial-A-Poem Switzerland.

On the occasion of John Giorno: The Performative Word, an Italian version of the work has been created specifically for MAMbo: Dial-A-Poem Italy. The project involved more than thirty contemporary Italian poets, selected by Caterina Molteni, curator at the museum, who lent their voices to the sound project that leads the public into the pulsating heart of Giorno’s vision. Among them are Antonella Anedda, Domenico Brancale, Milo De Angelis, Valerio Magrelli, and Patrizia Valduga. As in the historic work, listening remains unpredictable in its Italian version as well: a call, an unexpected voice, a poetic fragment that transforms the experience into a private performance. A new telephone number, +39 051 0304278, is active for the duration of the exhibition and can be reached free of charge twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, by anyone.

Within the exhibition, a section dedicated to archival materials is curated by Nicola Ricciardi with the collaboration of Eleonora Molignani, and features an exhibition design by EX. (Andrea Cassi, Serena Giardina, Michele Versaci).