As listeners of this podcast likely know, and as Rozzell Medina emphasizes throughout today’s conversation, “radical” literally means “of the root.” In the space of this interview, Rozzell and I consider this word—consider roots—in relation to Home, homecoming, and homelands; punk rock; the flourishes and fruits of Indigenous, African and Afro futurist cinema; the strange loops and chaos-play of Avant Garde art; and our own practices of imagination.
Rozzell Medina is a multicultural artist, musician, writer, and educator with ancestral roots in Hopi-Tewa, Mexican-American, and European traditions. He is the director of the Portland EcoFilm Festival at the Hollywood Theatre, the premiere international ecological film festival in the USA Pacific Northwest. Through partnerships with the Clemente Course in the Humanities, Bard College, and Oregon Humanities, Rozzell creates and instructs college courses on intersections of avant-garde imagination, futurisms, and socially engaged art making.
Rozzell and I cover quite a bit of ground in this interview, but its commitment to radical imagination for the sake of “the world’s child” feels very complete and full circle to me—especially in conversation with the Mad Max 2020 Immersion episode with Rozzell that I released back in November.
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