I Have Imagined Things Only True Believers Can See

Following the 2023 project dedicated to John Giorno and Ugo Rondinone, Riccardo Benassi’s robotic performance ULTRAMORE in 2024, and the screening of Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s ΊΚΑΡΟΣ (Icarus) in 2025, Palazzo Bentivoglio will reopen its garden gates on June 10, 2026, for twelve evenings to present 'I Have Imagined Things Only True Believers Can See', a new work by Mario García Torres conceived specifically for the site. The public presentation of 'I Have Imagined Things Only True Believers Can See' will be accompanied on June 10 at 9:30 PM by the artist’s performance 'Five Feet High and Rising', designed as the ideal first activation of the work. Previously presented at the 2017 Sharjah Biennial and the C3A in Cordoba in 2022, the performance is a lecture-DJ set that traces a cultural history of rivers as meeting points for different civilizations and subjectivities. 'I Have Imagined Things Only True Believers Can See', which is intended to remain in the Palazzo Bentivoglio garden, stems from García Torres’s reflection on 'Autoritratto (mi fuma il cervello)' (1993), one of Alighiero Boetti’s final works: a life-sized bronze sculpture in which the artist depicts himself holding a garden hose above his head, from which a jet of water flows and turns into steam upon contact with a heating system embedded in the sculpture. With 'I Have Imagined Things Only True Believers Can See', García Torres isolates the hose, removing it from the original figure and transforming it into an autonomous presence. Crafted from patinated copper, the installation takes the form of a garden hose over sixty meters long, tangled in an exaggerated manner as it winds through a flowerbed and sprays a jet of water onto a glowing hot plate, generating steam. True to his practice of reactivating figures, episodes, and myths from art history, García Torres does not offer a direct citation, but rather an imaginative shift. Boetti’s gesture is pushed to its extreme consequences: the hose seems to emancipate itself from its author, acquire a life of its own, tangle itself in space, and ironically continue to seek that same creative tension evoked in the original work.