Yes We Cannibal is a platform for new art and thought founded and directed by Mat Keel and Liz Lessner.
From 2020-2025, Yes We Cannibal operated as a non-transactional project space on Government Street in Baton Rouge, a fault line between multi-million-dollar redevelopment projects and a structurally disinvested community on the site of the former Magnolia Mound plantation.
The pair produced over 40 gallery exhibitions, various publications, and vinyl records. They worked with or hosted a very large cohort of artists and thinkers including Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Luke Stewart, Graham Harman, Vinay Gupta, Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Curtis Schreier from Ant Farm, Ryan C. Clarke, Tatsuya Nakatani, Tunde Wey, Ivy Woods, Louisa Minkin and Francis Summers, and many others. They distributed Plan B and fentanyl test strips and hosted a community fridge. They had a popcorn machine.
Yes We Cannibal continues to operate as a research group, functioning alternately and sometimes simultaneously as method, intervention, and producer - a way of thinking about what can happen and what can be made in a space that refuses to rehearse those forms that generated the violence it opposes.
