On January 18, 1863, U.S. soldiers at Fort McLane brutally murdered the Apache Bedonkohe chief, Mangas Coloradas, 15 miles south of Pinos Altos in New Mexico Territory. The soldiers then cut off his head and rendered the skull. 

Although our installation uses this ugly incident as its focal point, along with the belief the Apache have that a person will travel through immortality in the physical state they were in when they died, we were more interested in the symbolic meaning of the phrase, wandering headless through eternity. To us, these words mean that as a species, collectively, we seem to wander in circles, to never learn from our past, to never have learned being human.