Text description provided by the architects. auruBOROS transforms the ancient image of the Ouroboros into a temporary urban organism that moves through New York City, connecting architecture, public space and collective experience.
Commissioned by Bvlgari as part of Serpenti Infinito, the installation was developed by Berlin-based artist duo Plastique Fantastique for the High Line beneath The Standard. The project responds to Serpenti's themes of transformation, renewal and continuity while translating them through the studio's long-standing practice of pneumatic architecture. Rather than reproducing the serpent as a fixed symbol, the artists opened the traditional circle of the Ouroboros and allowed its body to extend into the city.
The site played a decisive role in shaping the work. The High Line brings together multiple urban layers: the elevated park, the street below, The Standard, surrounding buildings, vegetation and the continuous flow of pedestrians. Plastique Fantastique imagined auruBOROS as part of a much larger organism already moving invisibly through these layers, with only fragments of its golden body becoming visible.
Constructed from lightweight, reflective membranes and held entirely by air pressure, the installation combines monumental scale with physical lightness. Its geometry was developed in response to wind, circulation, anchoring, sightlines, public safety and the architecture of the site. The reflective gold surface is equally important to the work. It absorbs daylight, buildings, vegetation, sky, and moving bodies, continuously transforming the image of the city. At different moments, the structure can appear intensely present or almost dissolve into its surroundings.
The title combines aurum, the Latin word for gold, with Ouroboros. Gold is understood here less as a symbol of luxury than through the alchemical idea of transmutation: matter passing from one state into another. The changing surface makes this transformation visible in real time.
As a temporary installation, auruBOROS also explores how memory is created in the present. Strangers briefly share the same space, image and moment, forming what the artists describe as a form of "Public Love." The structure disappears after ten days, but the experience may continue through memory, conversation, and an altered perception of the site. In this sense, the work adds a temporary layer to New York's urban memory while inviting a collective imagination of what the city might become.
auruBOROS
LOCATION New York, United States
ARCHITECT Plastique Fantastique
PHOTOGRAPHY Park Swan, Lavinia Freitas and Marco Canevacci