Ghost Altar, Here Lay A Home
Here Lay Home explores the residue of migration, memory, and the invisible weight of “home.” The work investigates how diasporic bodies carry fragmented geographies — physical, emotional, and ancestral — and how light, sound, and found objects become vessels for holding what cannot be spoken.
At its core, Ghost Altar operates as a threshold: a space where absence gathers into form and where memory, like sound, becomes spatial. The installation draws from Afro-Indigenous ritual structures, Belizean domestic altars, and contemporary sonic architecture to create a site for reflection and encounter. Using minimal gestures — light, shadow, textiles, resonance, and the careful arrangement of personal and inherited objects — the altar creates a quiet field of attention where the viewer meets their own histories.
The work continues an ongoing practice of treating sound as both a material and an archive. Even when silent, the Ghost Altar is built from the idea of listening as a form of remembering. Each object is placed intentionally, treated as a transmitter of lineage, a carrier of echoes from the multiple homes we inhabit.
In Here Lay Home, the altar becomes a living document. A portal. A haunted architecture. A home assembled from light, loss, and inherited frequency.
Here Lay A Home is a collective of cultural workers
observing the making and unmaking of home through its material and sonic impressions on Altadena, CA. Weaving disciplines of archive stewardship, collaborative media, and earth architecture, the collective offers a cathartic labor of building from broken parts and the ground that remains. Together, the group composes an ephemeral home for memory objects, loss, and transformation, and the community outcry that wills a place to exist beyond its realized disaster. As Altadena resists erasure by environmental crisis, gentrification, and displaced histories, Here Lay A Home's namesake exhibition recognizes the nature of impermanence and the work of preserving home when the structure is no longer standing.
This exhibition stages the collective's second participatory installation as part of the Altadena Altarvention series in response to the Eaton Fires, and is presented alongside a series of concurrent programming on memory, ecology, and housing. We invite Altadena residents and the surrounding community to offer their realities of reconstructing and to commemorate their own homes with casts of salvaged objects, personal archive sessions, community roundtables, and collaborative performances of shared voice.
The Here Lay A Home collective is stewarded by Kennedy Arnette, Cienna Benn, Kikesa Kimbwala DeRobles, Mia Glionna, Parker Graffham, Phillip Harper, David Hines, Allison McAdoo, Kiara Walls, and Lauren Williams.