The 2007 UNESCO forum, stated that up to 95% of sub-Saharan African artefacts are held in western museums. The VESSEL is a traditional contemporary vernacular for the LOBI peoples, rehousing their BATEBA figures of antiquity, repatriated from Western institutions and museums. The present is protected within a liminal architecture and the future is manifested through craft. The thesis hypothesised: in reshrining repatriated Bateba of antiquity, new Bateba would be solely crafted for socio-religious purposes like in bygone times - thus curtailing the contemporary commodification of the sacred. The prospect of new sculptural invention increasingly manifests as fact rather than fiction.