The Everyday Sacred creates sacred spaces for ancestral devotion through the development of an aesthetic practice that uses bovine leather as a liberation device and a means to redress the colonization of Bantu people and their spiritual practices. In many African spiritual practices, animals play central roles in ceremonies and offerings as they are seen to exist between the human and the divine, the physical and the spiritual. In Bantu culture, cattle are revered as “God with wet noses” and repositories of Bantu ancestry––they become channels bridging the human realm and the ancestral realm. The manipulation of leather into standing altars becomes a means to relink nature and everyday spirituality. The altars are “center posts” or spaces of spiritual focus used to engage the spirit realm through thought, prayer, and offerings for local animal life, symbolic of tributes to the ancestors.
