Inside Bvlgari’s extraordinary new Serpenti Infinito installation on New York’s High Line
For Bvlgari’s latest chapter of Serpenti Infinito, Berlin-based duo Plastique Fantastique have imagined a golden serpent emerging from the High Line — a fleeting monument to transformation, connection and the city’s ever-changing rhythm.
As New York comes alive for Fashion Week, something unexpected has surfaced.
On the High Line, where wild grasses and flowers thread between steel and concrete, a monumental form in shimmering gold appears to push its way upwards from beneath the city. A coiling form emerges from beneath The Standard, winding into an architectural apparition — at once serpent, sculpture and urban hallucination.
This is auruBOROS — Urban Memory and Collective Dream, Bvlgari’s latest chapter of Serpenti Infinito and its first public art installation in the United States. Created by Berlin-based artistic duo Marco Canevacci and Yena Young of Plastique Fantastique, the temporary work turns one of New York’s most recognisable public spaces into something altogether less familiar: part sculpture, part architecture, part imagined creature.
Bvlgari has taken Serpenti into the public realm before, but Serpenti Infinito has always been about what happens when the symbol encounters somewhere new. Its journey began in Shanghai in 2023, before continuing to Seoul and Mumbai in 2025. Each chapter considers how one enduring motif can travel, absorb the character of its surroundings and become something else. It feels particularly at home in New York — a city that has transformation written into its very fabric.
The starting point for auruBOROS, however, is much older. Its title draws on the ouroboros, the serpent depicted consuming its own tail — a symbol of infinity, cyclical renewal and perpetual return. But rather than closing the serpent into a perfect circle, Young and Canevacci have opened it out into the metropolis.
“We wanted to open this closed circle, which is self-repetition, and then let it flow through the city,” Young tells Remix just before the unveiling. “This imaginary creature is going through the whole city in New York, and we open up one fragment to show it to the public.”
The result is a fragment of something much larger, its body seeming to continue beyond what we can see, its pneumatic forms threading between planting and architecture.
“We let it grow between the soil and the upper part of The Standard,” says Canevacci. “The installation itself is coming from the city itself.”
There is something particularly fitting about its setting. The High Line exists in its own layer of New York, suspended between the street below and the skyscrapers above, its landscape cutting a green line through one of the world’s most intensely built environments.
“The High Line is very special. There’s a street level, and the High Line level, and people are moving through one linear line, and there’s a building - a vertical line,” says Young.
For Canevacci, those intersecting planes became part of the sculpture itself. “Having the High Line and a different layer, horizontal layer, and mixing it with all the vertical layers of this town let us imagine this loop that is taking advantage of the specific urban condition that the city is offering.”
Visitors don't simply stand before the work; they pass through it, becoming part of the loop themselves. “Everyone has a different experience according to the weather condition, their own state of mind. And once they are inside the installation, they are part of this loop,” says Canevacci.
From the beginning, the pair were interested in what would happen when the work met its audience. What started as a small-scale clay model became a meeting point for strangers.
“What we were interested in is the reaction or interaction with the public,” says Young. “Especially here, we created this temporary installation that the public are strangers gathered in the same place at the same time, looking at the same thing, imagining possibilities of the future.”
It is an unexpectedly intimate ambition for something so monumental.
“In all of our work, our goal is to achieve a connection between strangers. And maybe by having this common experience, you can start to talk to each other, to explain the emotion that you have through this experience, and we want to achieve a kind of public love,” says Canevacci.
Even the sculpture's reflective gold surface becomes part of that exchange. As people photograph themselves against it, other visitors inevitably appear in the same frame — strangers who, for a moment, occupy the same image.
“I find it really beautiful that you share the moment without talking to each other, like as strangers,” says Young.
It is here that the title Urban Memory and Collective Dream begins to reveal itself: not only as a meditation on the physical city, but on the fleeting relationships that happen within it.
And there is something fitting, too, about Serpenti finding itself at the centre of that exchange. Bvlgari’s legendary serpent has always been a creature of reinvention, moving between jewellery, watches and art, changing scale and character while retaining its unmistakable sense of allure.
“There is a kind of sensuality in the Serpenti,” says Canevacci. “I think also Elizabeth Taylor was aware of that.”
The serpent finds another expression this September, with three new Serpenti Tubogas pieces and an exclusive High Accessories minaudière drawing on New York’s artistic history. Making their worldwide debut alongside auruBOROS, the creations translate the city’s influence into jewellery.
The High Line itself is a story of reinvention: once a railway, now a garden; once infrastructure, now one of New York’s most distinctive public spaces. auruBOROS feels similarly caught between states — monumental yet ephemeral, solid in appearance yet held aloft by something as intangible as air.
“The air is our medium,” says Canevacci. “It’s our tool actually, how we create our work. The beauty about the air is that it’s the most democratic element we do have, because we all need to breathe.”
Perhaps that is what makes auruBOROS feel less like an object placed on the High Line and more like something that has momentarily emerged from it. Its scale is spectacular, its gold surface unmistakably luxurious, its form rooted in one of Bvlgari's most recognisable symbols — but its meaning belongs to whoever happens to walk through it.
The serpent is only here from September 10 to 20. Then, as Canevacci puts it: “And then it disappeared, and this is how it becomes part of your memory, and you relate to this in a different way.”
You approach. You enter. Gold catches the changing light. The city bends across its surface. Somewhere in the reflection, another stranger appears beside you. For a moment, everyone is inside the same loop.
Then the serpent disappears. The city, of course, remains — restless, layered and endlessly becoming something else. Just like Serpenti.
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