In the year 2000, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven celebrated its 575th anniversary. To express its connection with the city of Leuven, the university decided to present the city with a gift. Jan Fabre was commissioned to create a sculpture. Totem was unveiled in October 2004. It is a beetle, measuring 2.7 metres across, that is speared to the sky on a needle that stretches to a height of 23 metres. Totem is placed on Ladeuzeplein, the square right in front of the central university library, the university's pre-eminent icon of knowledge and science.

A totem is a meeting point as well as a symbol of a different reality, beyond human perception. That way, Totem emphasises the relationship between art and science, because imagination is indispensable for both good art and good science. Without imagination, science remains a dry description of a dead reality. Without imagination, art does no more than represent reality as more beautiful than it really is. We need imagination to be able to think differently, to be able to presume things we cannot see directly. The beetle expresses this transition. Already among the Egyptians, the scarab was the symbol of transformation, of metamorphosis: a life beyond reality, a resurrection. But Fabre's original inspiration comes from seventeenth-century Flemish Vanitas scenes. Many of these paintings are crawling with insects, referring to the transience and death, the necessary precondition for every metamorphosis or resurrection.

The beetle has been pinned to the clouds, to a horizon of insight, of renewal. The beetle's pose is also revealing. In contrast to the real dead beetles in the archive cabinets of the nearby department of zoology, this beetle has not been immobilised and pinned down, folded into a posture of death. It stands in the air, wings outspread and legs akimbo, ready to fly off.