Plastique Fantastique Takes Bulgari’s Serpenti to Monumental Scale

T he serpent is one of those motifs that seems to move even when fixed in place. In “auruBOROS,” a new commission for Bulgari, the Roman High Jeweler, artist duo Plastique Fantastique expands that latent movement into a sculpture visitors can move through. From September 10–20, the artwork, an air-filled structure pairing physical lightness with monumental scale, rises on New York’s High Line. It marks Bulgari’s first public art installation in the US and the latest chapter of Serpenti Infinito, a project exploring the icon through contemporary art.

The sculpture takes the form of broad, swelling golden arcs that appear to rise from beneath The Standard hotel, turning and folding back on themselves in a rhythm that suggests a serpent without ever resolving into one. For all their visual heft, these volumes are almost entirely air, creating a perceptual contradiction: the impression of mass without its expected weight. Between the loops, openings appear and disappear as the viewer moves, so the sculpture can register in turn as a continuous coil, a sequence of portals or a single body caught mid-turn. That ambiguity also allows it to invert the usual relationship between ornament and body. Rather than the serpent coiling around a wearer, here the visitor is contained, however briefly, within the coil, passing beneath its arches before emerging on the other side.

For the Maison, that inversion carries particular resonance. First introduced in 1948 as a bracelet-watch, Serpenti wrapped sinuously around the wrist, its spiraled band made using the Tubogas technique to give precious metal an unusual suppleness. “AuruBOROS—Urban Memory and Collective Dream,” to give the work its full name, reverses those proportions. What is intimate becomes monumental, and a motif traditionally articulated in relation to the body becomes a space large enough to surround it.

Its golden surface introduces another kind of movement. Highly reflective, it catches fragments of sky, planting, surrounding buildings and passing figures, stretching and compressing them across its convex curves. A familiar cityscape is broken into shifting, distorted views, so that the apparent solidity of the sculpture is continually unsettled by what moves across it. Bulgari connects “auruBOROS” to the alchemical idea of gold as transformative matter. Here, that transformation is made visible.

This responsiveness is characteristic of Plastique Fantastique’s practice, which grew out of Canevacci’s experiments with pneumatic structures in Berlin in 1999 and today develops in collaboration with Young. Both came to pneumatic structures through architecture, though by different routes. Young, who trained in architectural engineering, encountered them independently in Helsinki in 2012, searching for an ephemeral structure that might conjure an imagined summer atmosphere in winter.

Their subsequent collaboration has moved increasingly away from architecture as an end in itself, folding sculpture, performance and multisensory installation into works that use temporary structures to unsettle familiar ways of seeing and moving through space. Most recently, Young represented Plastique Fantastique in the Korean Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, an exhibition that explored ideas of temporality, transformation and the future of the pavilion.

What matters is what these pneumatic structures make possible. Performance, music and dance have all entered their installations, drawing the public into the experience rather than keeping them at a spectator’s remove. Their light, mobile forms can temporarily change the function of shared space, allowing a familiar route or gathering place to acquire, for the duration of a work, a different set of possibilities.

Young has described her own inclination to Australian Design Review as “a softer approach rather than a concrete one.” It is an apt description of work that can command considerable scale without aspiring to permanence. Air is not simply a means of construction but a way of inserting a temporary reality into an existing one.

That impulse also shapes the way their work enters public space. “With inflatables, we disorient the public and stimulate them to look at the everyday in a different way,” Canevacci and Young told Italian architecture and design magazine Abitare. In “auruBOROS,” the effect is achieved through a form that both interrupts an existing route and invites passage through it, asking visitors to encounter familiar surroundings from an altered perspective.

Stripped of eyes, scales, head and tail, the serpent nevertheless remains legible, its identity condensed into the looping gesture of the coil. That abstraction is not alien to Serpenti. Across its history, Bulgari has moved between more figurative snakes and designs in which a spiraling line or repeated curve is enough to evoke the motif. The serpent’s identity, in other words, resides as much in the way it moves as in its anatomy. In Bulgari’s jewelry, that quality is expressed in the way Serpenti coils around the wrist or follows the line of the neck. Plastique Fantastique carries that principle into another medium, translating a gesture normally traced against the body into one the body can pass through.

For Bulgari CEO Laura Burdese, Serpenti is “a symbol of perpetual transformation and infinite renewal.” Serpenti Infinito tests that idea through contemporary art and, Burdese says, reflects Bulgari’s commitment to art as “a universal language that connects cultures, inspires dialogue and celebrates creativity in all its forms.” The project began in Shanghai in 2023 before continuing through Seoul and Mumbai in 2025, with each edition reconsidering the Serpenti icon in a new cultural setting.

In New York, the movement between artwork and jewelry runs both ways. Alongside “auruBOROS,” Bulgari will unveil three new Serpenti Tubogas High Jewelry creations and an exclusive High Accessories minaudière. Together, they return the sculpture’s monumental coil to the intimate scale of an object worn or held.

Its impermanence gives “Urban Memory and Collective Dream” a final resonance. For less than two weeks, “auruBOROS” will alter a familiar route through Manhattan and then disappear, leaving its afterlife to memory rather than matter. Burdese describes Serpenti as an invitation to “embrace change as a source of beauty, innovation and inspiration.” In Plastique Fantastique’s hands, change is built into the lifespan of the artwork itself. The serpent may return endlessly, but it never has to return in the same shape.

“auruBOROS” by Plastique Fantastique will be on view on the High Line at Little West 12th Street, New York, from September 10–20, 2026. Discover more.