Biography
Tunde Wey is a Nigerian artist, cook and writer using Nigerian food to interrogate colonialism, capitalism, and racism. He has been featured by The NY Times, NPR, Food and Wine and others. His writing has appeared in many publications. He is currently working on a book of essays to be published by MCD Books.
Yes We Cannibal is a project space for new art and thought, hosting geographically diverse artists, musicians, and thinkers. They primarily serve three communities: their immediate neighborhood, their city’s art community, and an international network of allied projects. YWC harbors unpoliced explorations of artistic and cultural taboo, transgression, and experimentation. They are anti-profit and non-hierarchical and are trying to create a viable alternative new model to sustain cultural experimentation.
Research
Tunde Wey at Yes We Cannibal: The Restaurant at the End of the World
This collaboration between artist Tunde Wey and Baton Rouge experimental project space Yes We Cannibal is a participatory, speculative, pedagogical dining event. It explores effects of the global pandemic on food supply and value chains, restaurant labor, food media and dining culture.
The exhibit space brings guests into a post-apocalyptic landscape scarred by a devastating event that has created abject climatic and social conditions. It uses the forms of fine-dining and speculative fiction as theater, to provoke social encounters which surface plantation history, ecological cataclysm, exploitation, wealth inequity, racial justice, and more.
The form of the event is a temporary restaurant space, open to the public for prix fixe dinner service. Diners are welcomed on a reservation-only basis. Dinner price is determined by their self-reported demographic information including race, income, gender, sexuality, education, healthcare, and vaccination status. These determinants inform the role attendees assume at the exhibit (as guest, or otherwise) and the price they pay (ranging from full cost to free) for their experience.
All exhibit materials will be deconstructed and transferred to community members who can make use of them. The event will live on as an archival website as YWC amplifies its echoes throughout the city afterwards.
