BVLGARI SENDS SERPENTI INTO THE NEW YORK SKYLINE WITH AURUBOROS

Bvlgari’s serpent has spent decades coiling around wrists, throats and the imagination of jewellery collectors. In New York this September, it has escaped the vitrine entirely. auruBOROS — Urban Memory and Collective Dream, created by Berlin art and architecture duo Plastique Fantastique, turns the Serpenti idea into a monumental golden pneumatic form on the High Line.

The installation is on view from 10 to 20 September above Little West 12th Street, placing one of Bvlgari’s most recognisable symbols inside a public landscape defined by reinvention. The High Line itself transformed obsolete industrial infrastructure into an elevated urban park; auruBOROS answers that history with a work built around memory, movement and transformation.

A SERPENT LARGE ENOUGH TO ENTER

Designed by Yena Young and Marco Canevacci of Plastique Fantastique, the work behaves less like a conventional sculpture than an inhabitable interruption. Its reflective golden volumes rise around and through the High Line’s structure, forming loops that can be approached at pedestrian scale. Depending on the angle, the piece reads as a serpent, double helix, architectural anomaly, or giant piece of jewellery translated into air and membrane.

The title itself combines the suggestion of gold — aurum — with the ouroboros, the ancient image of a serpent consuming its own tail. That cyclical symbol is particularly compatible with Serpenti, which Bvlgari has repeatedly used to express renewal and transformation. The artwork does not reproduce a bracelet or necklace. Instead, it takes the underlying idea and lets another creative discipline remake it.

auruBOROS forms part of Bvlgari’s wider Serpenti Infinito project, which has taken the motif into contemporary-art conversations in cities including Shanghai, Seoul and Mumbai. New York represents the project’s first United States public-art chapter. The programme extends beyond the High Line through experiences including animation at Bvlgari’s Fifth Avenue flagship and the launch of high-jewellery creations that interpret aspects of the city’s artistic history through the language of Serpenti.

That expansion makes strategic sense. Jewellery icons stay alive when they can carry new meanings without losing their original identity. Serpenti is unusually well suited to this because the snake is older than any maison: a symbol loaded with ideas of rebirth, seduction, danger and eternity across cultures. Bvlgari does not have to invent the mythology; it has to keep finding contemporary ways to inhabit it.

WHEN JEWELLERY LEAVES THE BODY

Public art also changes the audience. High jewellery is inherently scarce and intimate, experienced by relatively few people at close range. A work on the High Line reverses that condition. It is free to encounter, impossible to wear and deliberately oversized. Yet it can send viewers back towards the jewellery with a clearer understanding of the house code behind it.

The most successful brand installations are not enlarged advertisements. auruBOROS works because it allows the Serpenti idea to become genuinely spatial: people can walk around it, through it and beneath its reflections while New York moves in the background. For a symbol associated with endless renewal, that may be the point. The serpent remains recognisable, but it never has to stay still.