Athens- and Berlin-based art duo Plastique Fantastique has threaded auruBOROS, a 30-meter (98-foot) golden serpent, through New York’s High Line, and the only thing holding it up is air. Bvlgari commissioned the work as the New York chapter of its Serpenti Infinito series, and it is the house’s first public art commission in the United States. It borrows the look of solid gold and monumental permanence, but it is a mirrored skin that keeps its shape only as long as its ventilators keep running.
Trained as architects, Rome-born Marco Canevacci studied at TU Berlin, and Seoul-born Yena Young studied at Yonsei University and Aalto University. Together they lead a practice founded in 1999 that builds temporary spaces out of air and plastic film. Their pneumatic installations have wrapped a Paris footbridge in a giant inflatable ring for Nuit Blanche in 2023 and filled the Venice Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. auruBOROS is the first public art installation in the United States for Plastique Fantastique.
The title fuses two words: aurum, Latin for gold, and ouroboros, the ancient image of a serpent devouring its own tail. The artists kept the reference and broke its geometry. The piece, they said in a statement, “began with the ancient image of the ouroboros, but instead of keeping the serpent as a closed circle, we opened it and allowed it to enter the city.” In an interview with Whitewall, Canevacci said the pair tested several configurations in their Berlin studio. They set aside “the idea of simply enlarging an existing symbol” early on.
From hotel to elevated park, the coils rise from The Standard Hotel and thread through the High Line at Little West 12th Street, in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Visitors can walk around the sculpture and beneath it. The open serpent is not an object set on the deck to be circled. It moves between the vertical and horizontal layers of the site, as a single body linking the building to the walkway.
The material list is short: golden mirrored TPU and the ventilators that inflate it. The inflatable sculpture measures 30 × 10 × 10 meters (98 × 33 × 33 feet). Its surface takes in the buildings, planting, sky and passers-by around it, and shifts with sunlight, weather and the hour. Drawing on alchemical tradition, the duo treats the gold finish as a material of transformation rather than of value. The color of permanence covers something that changes by the minute.
Air is the real medium here, and the artists trace it back to the Greek pneuma, a single word for breath, air and spirit. It explains how a structure of this scale can weigh almost nothing. It is also the most ordinary thing strangers on the High Line share. “Although it appears monumental, the entire structure exists through air and is temporary,” the artists said. “We were interested in that contradiction: something that looks precious and permanent but is actually light, fragile, and transient.”
A park built on reuse is a fitting ground for a work subtitled Urban Memory and Collective Dream. The High Line runs along a disused freight viaduct of the New York Central Railroad’s West Side Line, and the park has a long record of public art in New York. Iván Argote’s Dinosaur, a giant pigeon on the High Line Plinth, stayed for 18 months. auruBOROS, an independent commission not affiliated with High Line Art, is on view for eleven days, from September 10 to 20, 2026.
Bvlgari’s serpent at city scale has already traveled: Bvlgari Serpenti Infinito began in Shanghai in 2023 and continued in Seoul and Mumbai in 2025. Each edition tests how the emblem adapts to a new place. The jeweler’s snake is a precise, worked form, while the duo’s medium is soft and provisional. Young told Whitewall that the pair chose to keep that tension rather than resolve it. The resulting High Line installation registers light, crowds and weather more readily than it displays a logo.
No visitor sees the whole reflection. The curved mirror returns fragments, such as a slice of brick façade, a patch of sky, or the shoulder of whoever is standing alongside, and each image is shared with the stranger next to you. Plastique Fantastique has long called these encounters Public Love. When the installation comes down after September 20, all that is left of a 30-meter serpent is the partial view each person had of it, and of the people who stood there too.
auruBOROS: Urban Memory and Collective Dream by Plastique Fantastique | Where: The High Line, Little West 12th Street, New York — When: September 10–20, 2026