Plastique Fantastique Produces Bvlgari’s Latest Chapter of Serpenti Infinito 

In 2023, Bvlgari revealed a program named “Serpenti Infinito” to ask questions about how a single symbol travels, translates, and transforms across culture. It debuted in Shanghai, and continued in Seoul and Mumbai in 2025. Last week, a new iteration hit New York. Named auruBOROS and conceived by Marco Canevacci and Yena Young behind the Berlin-based duo Plastique Fantastique, the piece imagines the invisible pressures and rhythms hidden beneath the city’s surface. 

Plastique Fantastique is known for immersive works that uncover the line between built environment and imagined landscape. Here, they drew upon the alchemical idea of gold as transformative matter, guiding visitors to a new scale and surface that reflects the dynamic state of New York City.

Whitewall spoke with Canevacci and Young about their creation for Bvlgari and how New York’s layered environment inspired its design. 

Bvlgari’s Latest Commission: Serpenti Infinito 

WHITEWALL: Serpenti Infinito has travelled from Shanghai to Seoul and Mumbai before arriving in New York. What was the brief Bvlgari brought you, and what did you set aside from it almost immediately?

MARCO CANEVACCI: Bvlgari invited us to respond to Serpenti Infinito and its ideas of transformation, renewal, and continuity in the context of New York. We began with the Ouroboros, the ancient image of a serpent consuming its own tail. In Berlin, we studied different configurations: a closed Ouroboros, intersecting serpents, multiple bodies, even an apparently infinite sequence.

What we set aside quite quickly was the idea of simply enlarging an existing symbol. Once we visited the High Line, the project became much more spatial. The circle opened, and the serpent began to connect different levels of the city, its architecture, and the people moving through it.

WW: The Serpenti is a fixed, precise, worked form. Your medium is soft, inflated and provisional. Where did those two languages meet?

YENA YOUNG: Rather than reproducing the serpent literally, we translated its movement, continuity, and relationship to the body into a pneumatic urban form. Serpenti has a very precise identity, while our structures are soft, temporary, and entirely dependent on air. We were interested in keeping that tension rather than resolving it. The result is both precise and provisional, monumental and fragile.

WW: Tubogas is a coiled gold tube. auruBOROS is described as pneumatic coiling forms in gold. How closely did you look at the jewelry itself while you were designing?

MC: Tubogas was not a direct reference for the design, and we did not study the jewelry as a formal model for auruBOROS. Our starting point was Serpenti Infinito as a broader idea: transformation, renewal, continuity, and the serpent as a body in motion. From there, the work developed through our own language of pneumatic architecture and, very importantly, through the specific conditions of the High Line. Any visual relationship between Tubogas and the coiling golden form emerged indirectly rather than through imitation. auruBOROS grew from the Ouroboros, air, and the architecture of the city.

The Site: New York City

WW: The High Line is a park built on an abandoned rail viaduct, and your piece rises from beneath The Standard. What did you notice on your first site visits that ended up in the final form?

YY: What struck us immediately was the number of urban layers. There is the street below, the elevated High Line, The Standard, the surrounding buildings and vegetation, and people moving through all of these levels at once. That vertical and horizontal complexity became central to the work. We began to imagine the serpent as a much larger organism already moving invisibly through the city, with only fragments of its body becoming visible. The final form grew directly from that reading of the site.

WW: Urban Memory is in the title. In Seoul, you invited people to excavate the ground and hang what they found inside the pavilion. What is the memory you are surfacing here, and how did you go looking for it?

MC: In Seoul, we worked with memory through archaeology: objects from the past were excavated and brought into the present. In New York, we are interested in memory at the moment it is being created. People experience auruBOROS now, already knowing that the installation will disappear and that this present moment will later become a memory. So auruBOROS adds another temporary layer to New York’s urban memory. The High Line already carries its own histories, routines, and accumulated experiences, and the installation briefly enters that continuum. What interests us is the temporary relationship that forms between strangers in public space. People who may never speak to one another briefly share the same place, image, and moment. We think of this as a form of public love.

While creating a memory together, they can also imagine what the city might become after the structure is gone. For us, that movement from present experience to future memory—and from temporary connection to collective imagination—is central to the work.

WW: The High Line has some of the tightest constraints in the city: wind, sightlines, crowd flow, permissions. How did those rules change the piece between the first sketch and what we see?

YY: With a pneumatic structure at this scale, artistic form and engineering cannot really be separated. Wind, anchoring, circulation, access, sightlines, and public safety all influenced the geometry and dimensions of the work. Some ideas had to become simpler, while others had to become much more precise. The details became critical: how the structure meets the ground, where it lands on The Standard’s balcony, how it is anchored near the billboard, and how each part responds to the surrounding architecture. We do not see these constraints simply as limitations. They help produce the final character of the work. The piece became more site-specific because it had to negotiate with the actual city rather than exist as an autonomous sculpture.

Making auruBOROS

WW: Walk us through the stages. What happened between the first drawing and the first full inflation, and at what moment did you know it worked?

YY: The process began in Berlin with concepts, sketches, and different serpent configurations. For us, however, the most important step is always the site visit. When we walk through a city and study a potential location, the surroundings begin to shape the work.

We walked the full length of the High Line, and the space beneath The Standard immediately drew us in: the large concrete opening, the flow of people, the vegetation, and the surrounding architecture all suggested a strong spatial direction. Once the site was confirmed, the geometry was continuously adjusted in response to architecture, engineering, circulation, and wind. Because we have worked with pneumatic structures for many years, we usually know from an early stage whether an idea can work. But the first full inflation still amazes us. When the structure finally stands on site at full scale, supported only by air, its presence is always more powerful than it appeared in our minds.

WW: What was the hardest technical problem, and how did you solve it?

MC: The main challenge was achieving a monumental form that could remain extremely light while performing safely in a very exposed urban condition. Wind was particularly important. The structure has a large surface area but very little physical mass, so its geometry, internal pressure, anchoring, and connection to the site all had to work together.

The solution came through continuous exchange between design, engineering, and fabrication. With pneumatic architecture, technical problems are never completely separate from artistic decisions. Each continuously informs the other.

WW: Gold is a difficult colour in a membrane. How did you arrive at that surface, and what does it do to the light across a day on the High Line?

YY: The reflective membrane responds continuously to daylight, weather, architecture, vegetation, and people. At sunrise and sunset, when the light becomes warmer and more directional, the gold can appear intensely present; at other moments, it darkens, distorts, or almost dissolves into its surroundings. The installation never shows the same city twice.

The connection to alchemy is important here. In alchemical thought, gold represented a perfected state of matter reached through a process of transmutation. We were interested in this idea of matter passing from one condition into another.

The surface of auruBOROS performs a similar transformation visually. It takes in the city—light, bodies, buildings, sky—and continuously converts those elements into a new image. Gold is therefore not simply a fixed finish. It becomes an active surface through which transformation is constantly taking place.

WW: What did the first full-scale test look like, and what did you change afterwards?

MC: We do not make a full-scale test before installation. The structures are simply too large and too site-specific to reproduce elsewhere. We test materials, details, connections, and smaller prototypes in advance, but the first time we see the entire work fully inflated is on site. That moment is always special because the structure can only really be understood in relation to its surroundings and to the public interacting with it. It is also the moment when the work leaves our hands and enters the unpredictable world of public space. Its scale, reflections, movement, and spatial impact only become fully visible through the actual architecture, urban conditions, and the people around it.

Ephemeral vs. Forever

WW: The idea of auruBOROS is infinity, but the piece stands for ten days. How do you hold those two things together?

YY: We think infinity does not necessarily mean physical permanence. The Ouroboros suggests continuity, repetition, and return, while auruBOROS exists only briefly. When people know the installation will disappear after ten days, they may experience it more intensely.

The structure is temporary, but what happens around it can continue through images, conversations, and the way that part of the city is remembered afterwards. This is where Urban Memory and Collective Dream come together. The work enters the city for ten days, becomes part of people’s lived experience, and may continue in the way they imagine that place after the structure is gone.

For us, temporary architecture is less about creating a permanent object than about creating something that remains through experience. auruBOROS will disappear, but the altered image of the city and the moments formed around it can remain. Perhaps that memory is the final material of our work.

WW: Plastique Fantastique has been experimenting with pneumatic structures since 1999. More than 25 years later, why is air still the right medium for saying something about a city?

MC: Air is still compelling to us because it is both democratic and invisible. It surrounds every body and fills every space. It carries pressure, temperature, sound, movement, smell, and atmosphere, yet most of the time we are barely aware of it. Pneumatic architecture allows us to give temporary form to this invisible condition. A very large spatial presence can be created from almost nothing. Over time, our interest has shifted from the inflatable object itself toward the relationships it produces—between bodies, architecture, atmosphere, attention, and memory. Air remains the right medium because it allows us to make those invisible relations temporarily perceptible.

WW: What do you want someone who walks past knowing nothing about it to leave with?

YY: We do not want someone to need prior knowledge in order to experience the work. Ideally, there is simply a shift in attention. A familiar part of the city suddenly looks unfamiliar.

Someone might notice a reflection, another person, a hidden spatial layer, or their own movement through the site. We are interested in these small disruptions of everyday perception. If the installation makes someone see that place differently, even briefly, and that altered perception remains after the structure is gone, then the work has continued beyond its physical presence.