Yes We Cannibal is a new community institution in Baton Rouge.
It is a home for unrestricted and non-hierarchical cultural experimentation in the areas of art, music, food, social research, performance, and more.
Yes We Cannibal (YWC) is chartered as an incubator for exploring new forms of living.
It is a space for different people to encounter one another.
These encounters may take the form of:
- Lectures
- Workshops
- Reading groups
- Food events
- Concerts
- Performances
- Art Exhibitions
- Demonstration projects, and more.
Anyone is welcome to attend and propose to lead events at Yes We Cannibal.
No one will be paid or will pay to attend or organize an event at Yes We Cannibal.
This is why we need your help.
In order for Yes We Cannibal to exist and to promote this kind of radical inclusivity, it must have no paywall. This is the only feasible way to build Yes We Cannibal here in Baton Rouge.
Baton Rouge is a complex, beautiful and important city yet it enjoys none of those visible counter-institutional art and culture sites which are common in wealthier cities like New York and Los Angeles, even New Orleans.
With this campaign, we humbly call on a giant horizontal network of micro-patrons to offer small donations to support establishing this space in a city that may be unfamiliar to you.
Why should you support us?
Ask yourself - what role have experimental cultural spaces played in your own life? How have they shaped you and your world? For us, they have been profoundly affirming and transformative. We passionately believe in their importance.
In addition to our large main space, we also have a fully functioning kitchen with new appliances, an administrative area, two bathrooms and a beautifully crafted reading room. Our front lot is large and paved as well.
Also, one length of our building runs down 16th St and we are already beginning a free public garden with flowers, fruits, vegetables and herbs.
This diversity of spaces allows Yes We Cannibal to host a wide range of events.
Our name is inspired by the early Brazilian modernist avant garde, and Oswald de Andrade's Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928) which proposed the possibility of devouring multiple opposing cultures - incorporating their strength and knowledge into something new and hybrid, rather than posing them against one another. This is our inspiration for an operational philosophy and praxis of consensual collective cultural synthesis.
Yes We Cannibal affirms the value of life and aims to support human liberation through non-hierarchical shared experimentation and the hard but joyful work of making possible worlds actual.
Sample of Scheduled Programming
ONGOING (Weekly, Bi-Monthly, Monthly)
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Sensory Engagement Lab (SEL) a free bi-weekly community technology and robotics salon and skills exchange that fosters collaboration between artists, programmers and other thinkers. Previously native to Washington DC.
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Affect, Decoloniality and Materialisms-yet-to-come (ADAM) a weekly open reading group dealing with new texts in art, philosophy and critical theory.
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Fine Young Cannibals an unconventional art club and salon for kids under ten to explore traditional 2d art forms as well as performance art, installation, conceptual art, zine making, etc.
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Weekly Freak Films: Sweet Movie (1971) and Mysteries of the Organism (1973) by Dušan Makavejev, Brother from Another Planet, Cannibal Tours, Cannibal Holocaust, Keep the River on Your Right, Holy Mountain, The Act of Killing, etc
- Seed Saving and Plant Clipping Klatsch
PRESENTATIONS (Artist and Researcher Talks, Lectures and Performances:)
WORKSHOPS /EVENTS
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Time/Space Fashion Runway A fashion walk-off event for aesthetic representatives from any time and space in human history, including imaginary ones. Berbers, Masai, Traditional British skinheads, Liliputians, etc
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Gentrification-jamming Salon techniques you can use in your own backyard drawing on lessons from Hakim Bey, Angela Davis, Fred Hampton. Beetlejuice, Blaxploitation films, Key and Peele sketches and more.
- Consent for Kids
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"Don't let your plants send you to Attica" Workshop how to best and most carefully follow Louisiana State Act No 159 (2005) which prohibits cultivation of more than 40 psychoactive plants, many of which are legal in all other U.S. states, and which risks punishment with a two year minimum sentence and forced labor.
- Talking with kids of all races honestly about police and abolition
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Mycoculture (Mushroom experiments, including foraging)
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Heliciculture (Snail Farming)
