In New Orleans the trees that line the Mardi Gras parade streets are strung with beads, with dolls, with old wigs; all tangled together with the old men’s beards of live oaks; a kind of parade palimpsest. Meanwhile in the ossuary at Kutna Hora, near Prague, an overcrowding problem has been solved by fashioning garlands and chandeliers from the bones of plague dead. In Totem Tree these come together with magic tokens from various belief systems across different times and cultures and hang on a strange tree captured at twilight in the cemetery at Kutna Hora.
