For eleven days in September, a gold serpent 98 feet long squeezed itself under The Standard hotel, right where the building straddles Manhattan’s High Line above Little West 12th Street.
People walked straight through its coils. It’s called “auruBOROS: Urban Memory and Collective Dream,” and it’s the work of Marco Canevacci and Yena Young, the duo behind the Berlin studio Plastique Fantastique.
The placement is what got us. The loops stand about 33 feet tall and are packed into the gap beneath the hotel so tightly that the whole thing seems to be holding the building up.
Most giant inflatables float free and cheerful (we rounded up a few from Milan Design Week earlier this year, and IKEA needed twenty prototypes just to make one you could sit in).
This one reads more like a spring someone loaded and walked away from.
And it’s almost nothing. The skin is a thin mirrored gold film, held taut by fans, and Hyperallergic noticed you could hear them hissing louder the closer you got. Plastique Fantastique has been building temporary spaces out of air and plastic since 1999, and the pair lean into the contradiction.
It looks monumental and precious. It’s really a breath of air in a shiny wrapper, and it was gone before the month was out.
The title is worth a second look. It folds two words together: aurum, Latin for gold, and ouroboros, the ancient image of a snake swallowing its own tail. But the artists pulled the circle open. Instead of a closed loop, you get a coil you can step inside, and its mirrored skin hands the city back to you, bent by the sun, the weather and the hour. The artists call those reflected run-ins with strangers “Public Love.” We like that a lot.
Yes, it’s a brand commission. Bvlgari paid for it as the New York chapter of Serpenti Infinito, its series of artist collaborations built around the house’s snake-shaped Serpenti jewelry, after earlier stops in Shanghai, Seoul and Mumbai. It was Bvlgari’s first public installation in the United States, timed to New York Fashion Week, and according to Colossal, it was Plastique Fantastique’s first time showing in the U.S. too. We still think it’s the most fun anyone has had under that building!
The gold skin isn’t new for them. In 2023 they looped a giant gold ring called “RINGdeLUXE” around a footbridge over the Seine for Nuit Blanche, Paris’s all-night arts festival, so anyone crossing the river had to walk straight through it.
Same shiny skin, same instinct to grab a piece of the city and squeeze. We’d love to see where they wedge one next. More from the studio on Instagram.
Images courtesy of Plastique Fantastique. Via Colossal and urdesignmag.
