Bvlgari’s Serpenti Takes Over the High Line

Plastique Fantastique transforms an icon of Italian jewellery into a monumental golden intervention in New York

Serpenti has left the scale of the body behind. For Bvlgari’s latest Serpenti Infinito chapter, Berlin based artist duo Plastique Fantastique has transformed the house’s enduring serpent into auruBOROS – Urban Memory and Collective Dream, a monumental public installation winding through New York’s High Line. Reflective, immersive and deliberately temporary, the work explores what happens when the language of jewellery expands into architecture, allowing the city itself to step inside one of luxury’s most recognisable symbols.

A serpent has surfaced in Manhattan. Beneath the High Line, enormous golden coils appear to push through the architecture, twisting around concrete supports and catching fragments of the city in their reflective surfaces. From one position the structure resembles an enormous piece of jewellery dropped into the urban landscape. From another, its shape becomes harder to resolve, disappearing behind architecture before emerging somewhere else. This is auruBOROS – Urban Memory and Collective Dream, the latest chapter of Bvlgari’s Serpenti Infinito project and perhaps one of the most literal demonstrations yet of how far the language of a luxury object can travel.

Bvlgari commissioned Berlin based artistic duo Plastique Fantastique, Marco Canevacci and Yena Young, to reinterpret Serpenti for New York. Their response takes the serpent away from the scale of the wrist and neck and expands it towards architecture. Constructed from immense pneumatic forms with a reflective golden surface, auruBOROS rises approximately 33 feet and stretches almost 100 feet through its High Line setting. Visitors do not simply stand before it. They move beneath, around and through it, becoming temporarily enclosed within the curves that have formed one of Bvlgari’s most recognisable design languages for generations.

That shift in scale is what makes the work interesting. Serpenti has always depended upon the relationship between object and body. Its coils wrap, encircle and move with the wearer. Plastique Fantastique has preserved that principle while changing the body involved. Here, the serpent interacts with the city itself. Concrete columns, the elevated park, pedestrians, surrounding buildings and changing daylight replace the wrist as the environment against which its form is understood. The artists have described carrying Serpenti’s ideas of transformation, renewal and movement from jewellery into architecture and the city.

The High Line is particularly suited to that proposition. The park is itself an exercise in transformation, created from a former elevated freight railway and reimagined as public space. Plastique Fantastique responded directly to that environment, including the elevated landscape, the street below, The Standard and the constant circulation of people through the area. The sculpture was engineered around the site's architecture, wind and pedestrian movement, making New York part of its construction rather than simply its backdrop.

Its title adds another layer. auruBOROS combines aurum, the Latin word for gold, with ouroboros, the ancient image of a serpent consuming its own tail. Yet Plastique Fantastique deliberately avoids creating a completely closed loop. The forms instead appear to extend into their surroundings, shifting the symbolism away from endless self containment and towards connection. The serpent becomes something that passes into architecture, public space and the lives moving through it.

Gold behaves differently at this scale too. On a piece of jewellery, its luminosity can be controlled through polish, form and the movement of a wearer. Across auruBOROS, the reflective surface absorbs an entire environment. Sunlight moves across it, pedestrians appear and disappear in distorted reflections and the surrounding architecture becomes temporarily incorporated into the object. The installation therefore changes continuously without physically changing at all. It is an appropriate quality for Serpenti, an emblem Bvlgari has repeatedly associated with metamorphosis and renewal.

There is also something significant about placing this expression of luxury in genuinely public space. auruBOROS is Bvlgari’s first public art installation in the United States and is freely accessible rather than contained within a boutique, museum exhibition or invitation only brand environment. During its brief life on the High Line, encountering Serpenti does not require purchasing jewellery or even intentionally seeking Bvlgari out. A person walking through Manhattan can simply find themselves beneath it.

This has increasingly become fertile territory for luxury houses. Their most valuable symbols now have cultural lives extending far beyond the products on which they originated. A motif can move from jewellery into exhibitions, installations, architecture and public spectacle, allowing a house to build a visual universe rather than merely a collection of objects. The challenge is whether the result has enough conceptual substance to exist beyond an enlarged logo. With auruBOROS, the translation is more convincing because the underlying qualities of Serpenti, its coil, movement, relationship to the body and associations with transformation, provide an actual formal language for the artists to manipulate.

The New York installation is part of a wider journey. Serpenti Infinito began in Shanghai in 2023 before later editions in Seoul and Mumbai, inviting contemporary artists to reinterpret the serpent across different cultural and geographic settings. New York extends that conversation into a city whose identity is itself built around perpetual movement and reinvention.

Its impermanence may ultimately be one of its most compelling qualities. The installation remains on the High Line only until September 20. Plastique Fantastique works frequently with temporary inflatable environments, and Young has described auruBOROS as being less concerned with leaving a permanent object than with creating a memory that survives its disappearance.

That thought brings the project back to jewellery in an unexpected way. Jewellery is built to endure, passed between people and sometimes generations. auruBOROS does almost the opposite. It takes one of Bvlgari’s most enduring symbols, makes it monumental and then allows it to disappear.

For ten days in New York, Serpenti no longer wraps itself around the body. The city steps inside it.