Artist duo Plastique Fantastique, Marco Canevacci and Yena Young, brought auruBOROS: Urban Memory and Collective Dream to New York as their first public art installation in the United States. Commissioned by Bvlgari for its Serpenti Infinito art series, the work stood on the High Line at Little West 12th Street from 10 to 20 September 2026.
auruBOROS is a sculpture of two intertwined gold coils that rise from The Standard Hotel and thread through the elevated park. Visitors could walk around and beneath it. Its mirrored surface took in the buildings, planting, sky and passers-by around it, and changed with sunlight, weather and the time of day. Monumental in scale, the sculpture was physically light, held up entirely by air.
The title joins aurum, the Latin word for gold, with ouroboros, the ancient image of a serpent consuming its own tail. Plastique Fantastique opened that closed circle and let the form enter the surrounding architecture as a continuous body, threading through the horizontal and vertical layers of the site. Drawing on alchemical tradition, the artists treat the gold surface as a material of transformation.
Air and memory
Air is the duo’s medium. Their pneumatic works are made of it, and it is the reason a thirty-metre sculpture can weigh almost nothing. The Greeks had a single word for it, pneuma: breath, air and spirit at once. It is also the simplest thing people share, passed lungful by lungful between strangers.
Memory is their second medium. Passing auruBOROS, no visitor saw a complete reflection; each shared the image with the strangers beside them. Because the work was temporary, every encounter was more intense. When strangers share a place, a moment and ideas, they begin to imagine the future together, which the artists have long called Public Love. Once the installation comes down, what remains is the memory of having stood there together and the collective dream those encounters open: the Urban Memory and Collective Dream of the subtitle.
“auruBOROS 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. Its gold, reflective body moves through the High Line, absorbing buildings, vegetation, people, weather, light and sky into its surface. Although it appears monumental, the entire structure exists through air and is temporary. We were interested in that contradiction: something that looks precious and permanent but is actually light, fragile, and transient. For us, the work ultimately becomes less about the object itself and more about the temporary experience it creates, and the memory that remains after it disappears.”
Plastique Fantastique
About the work
auruBOROS (2026) measures 30 × 10 × 10 metres and is made of golden mirrored TPU and ventilators. Plastique Fantastique has created immersive spatial installations since 1999, inviting the public to explore an imaginary landscape within the existing world. Based in Athens and Berlin, the duo took part in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 with the Venice Pavilion, and Yena Young’s Korean Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025 was developed in collaboration with the studio.
The installation is Bvlgari’s first public art commission in the United States and the newest chapter of its Serpenti Infinito art series, following exhibitions in Shanghai in 2023 and in Seoul and Mumbai in 2025. It is an independent commission and is not affiliated with High Line Art.
Artist: Plastique Fantastique / @plastique.fantastique
Photography: Marco Canevacci, Lavínia Diniz Freitas, Swan Park
Location: The High Line, Little West 12th Street, New York
