YFTSITS | ROOTED READINGS

An intimate gathering of spoken word, readings, and oral history that traces how memory and lineage live in the stories we carry. An intimate gathering of spoken word, readings, and oral history that traces how memory and lineage live in the stories we carry and the voices we pass them through. About the Facilitator: Def Sound (pronouns they/them) is an Afro-Caribbean postbinary cosmosapian born, watered & raised in South Central LA. Def works as a conceptual word artist, Grammy Nominated producer, poet, award-winning academic, and Hip-Hop MC. Def Sound writes raps for people that read books and travels the world with their live band The Vibrarians.Def is the founder of the emerging school of thought Black Arts Radical Studio also known as BARS. BARS is The Black Arts Radical Studio is an educational and healing resource for MCs and word-based Hip Hop practitioners interested in building principled professional, sustainable, multi-decade careers through art, storytelling, and poetry. Def is currently a professor teaching Hip Hop Theory & Praxis and Sonic Collage at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). About the exhibition: Your Fruit Tastes Sweet, I Taste Sweat examines systems of labor, migration, extraction, memory, and care through the movement of Central American people, histories, materials, and traditions into Los Angeles. Tracing connections between Central America and the metropolitan landscape of Los Angeles, the exhibition considers how histories of agricultural labor, migration, colonial extraction, ecology, and cultural memory travel across borders and generations. This interdisciplinary exhibition looks particularly at how these systems become visible through the first-generation experience—via inherited memory, family histories, food, labor, cultural adaptation, and the ongoing negotiation between where one comes from and where one is building a life. The exhibition asks audiences to consider what is carried across generations, what is transformed through migration, and what histories remain hidden beneath the things we consume. This exhibit is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.