The 19th edition of the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival (TTFF/25) takes place from September 24 to 30, 2025, with screenings in Woodbrook, Chaguanas and San Fernando. Stating that each year, the TTFF “selects a visual artist whose work expands how we think about storytelling, memory, and place,” the organizers announced that Rodell Warner is the Festival Artist this year. Here are excerpts from an interview with the artist. [Read the full interview at TTFF.]
[. . .] For 2025, we are proud to announce Rodell Warner as the Festival Artist. A boundary-pushing visual artist and digital archivist, Warner’s work for TTFF/25 brings together over 15 years of personal creative exploration and a deep love for the Caribbean image. In this exclusive interview, Warner takes us inside his creative practice, his fascination with the archive, and the layered inspirations behind this year’s festival poster.
Tell us your name and what you do.
My name is Rodell Warner and I’m a visual artist. I make moving images – I work a lot with archival imagery; computational images; artificially generated images that I turn into moving images.
Tell us where your interest in archive began.
My interest in archives began around 2009. I was about 23 – I’d started working at an advertising agency in Port of Spain with 15 or so artists who were all older than me. A few of them, including Dave Williams and Richard Rawlins, would talk a lot about Trinidad and Tobago, and how much they love it and how much has changed and how much I don’t know about it!
At the time my focus was very outward. I was not looking at Trinidad in a very loving way – but they were, and it was kind of contagious. So, out of curiosity, wanting to know what they were talking about and also wanting to locate myself within the history of the place that they were talking about, I started looking for old images of Trinidad and Tobago online. I would use random search terms in Google, like ‘Trinidad shoes 1955’ or ‘Trinidad bed 1975’. I would just choose random words. And sometimes I would be focused about it – looking for performers, artists and musicians. But I would find all these really interesting images – things I was never exposed to before. And I started collecting them. I had a Tumblr blog at the time, called TooMuchEyes. It’s still up. And you can go to the page online and see what I saved from 2009 to around 2014. It’s just a lot of archival images of Trinidad and Tobago for the most part. That was my first archiving project and what got me into archives. [. . .]
Rodell Warner is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography, and a Moving Image master’s student at Bard College. Rooted in the exploration of race, nature, and technologies of representation, Rodell’s artworks draw on personal and institutional archives to rethink the past, and on digital processes to index emancipatory futures. Rodell’s digital animations intervening in early photography from the Caribbean have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the landmark exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory in 2022, and in 2024 in the Tito’s Prize solo exhibition Fictions More Precious at Big Medium in Austin, Texas. Rodell’s TERRARIA ⚘ – animated works showing hand-modeled digital 3D renderings of site-identified plant species seen through unique lenses in virtual environments – has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei in NEXUS－Video and New Media Art from the Caribbean in 2023, and in 2024 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in the exhibition Sea Change. Rodell’s web-based moving image installation World Is Turning, which serves as both personal memoir and living archive, debuted at the Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY) in 2025.
Over the last 15 years Rodell has worked between Port of Spain, Trinidad, Kingston, Jamaica, and Austin, Texas in the US, and is currently living and working in Boston, Massachusetts.
For full interview, see https://ttfilmfestival.com/meet-ttff-25-festival-artist-rodell-warner/
Visit Rodell’s website at https://cargocollective.com/rodellwarner
Also read https://glasstire.com/2024/06/28/why-should-i-not-imagine-it-a-conversation-with-rodell-warner/
[Image above: Artificially augmented version of a photo by Blair J. Meadows.]