Artist duo Plastique Fantastique (Marco Canevacci and Yena Young) present auruBOROS: Urban Memory and Collective Dream, their first public art installation in the United States. Commissioned by Bvlgari for their Serpenti Infinito art series, the work is on view at The High Line, Little West 12th Street, from September 10 to 20, 2026.
auruBOROS is a sculpture of two intertwined gold coils that rise from The Standard Hotel and thread through the elevated park of the High Line. Visitors can walk around and beneath the work. Its mirrored surface takes in the buildings, vegetation, sky, and passers-by around it, and changes with sunlight, weather, and time of day. Monumental in scale, the sculpture is physically light and held entirely by air.
The title combines aurum, the Latin word for gold, with ouroboros, the ancient image of the serpent consuming its tail. Opening the traditional closed circle, the artists let the form enter the surrounding architecture as a continuous body threading the horizontal and vertical layers of the site. Drawing on alchemical tradition, they treat the gold surface as a material of transformation.
Air is Plastique Fantastique's medium. It is the material their pneumatic works are made of, and 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 we share, passed lungful by lungful between strangers.
Memory is their second medium. Passing auruBOROS, no visitor sees a complete reflection; each shares the image with the strangers beside them. Because the work is temporary, every encounter happens more intensely. When strangers share a place, a moment, and ideas, they begin to imagine the future together. This is what the artists have long called Public Love. When the installation comes down, what remains is the memory of having stood there together, and the collective dream those encounters open. These are 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
Team:
Architects: Plastique Fantastique
Photography © Marco Canevacci, Lavínia Diniz Freitas, Swan Park
