Rozalinda Borcilă
Rozalinda Borcilă (she/they) is a Romanian immigrant, artist, and activist. She develops long-term research projects that combine analytic and embodied modes of learning. Her work explores settler colonialism as a placemaking project that involves multiple and entangled violences. How do the grammars of settler violence coalesce around extractive forms and flows of capital, around institutional forms and regimes of property—but also around modes of feeling, modes of relation, and everyday experiences of being in place? Recently she has focused on the governance of waterscapes under the calculative logic of offsetting and on glacial narratives as modes of colonial knowing. She creates publications, video essays, installations, media/web platforms, and experimental seminars or learning walks scripted with and for various community groups. She works in different institutional and counter-institutional settings: museums, universities, art centers, community spaces, squats, and in the streets.
Rozalinda developed the experimental seminar, video, and walking project, Underlying Miami: Sea Level Rise and Settler Futurities, for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and also exhibited in the New Local in Brussels. She completed Meskonsin-Kansan, a book and walking project in collaboration with scholar Nicholas Brown and artist/anthropologist Lance Foster, Vice Chair of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. Her collaborative video installation with Andrea Carlson, entitled Hydrologic Unit Code 071200 – Nibi Ezhi-Nisidawaabanjigaade Ozhibii’igeowin 071200, was commissioned by the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Her project Im/Memorial is the recipient of an Arthur and Lila Weinberg Fellowship for Independent Researchers from the Newberry Library. She is a recipient of the Illinois Artist Fellowship and of a MacDowell awards Fellowship.
For the past two decades, Rozalinda has also been active in migrant solidarity and border abolition communities. She is a founding member of NoShelter and A Prison is No Shelter Media, activist media projects that explore the use of congregate care and social service provision as carceral structures, particularly in immigrant detention. Please see www.NoShelterProject.com
still from "Offset Landscapes" video series
Along the Roseatte Spoonbill trail, a mitigation trail cutting between prisons, mine quarries and warehouse districts
Featured Artworks
Hydrologic Unit Code 071200 – Nibi Ezhi-Nisidawaabanjigaade Ozhibii’igeowin 071200
Collaboration with Andrea Carlson
Five-channel video installation, printed matter
An installation and printed essay traversing mitigation banks in the watershed of the Chicago River, legally known as Hydrologic Unit Code 071200. These constructed wetlands are a form of development that produces credits for sale in wetland credit markets, akin to carbon trading.
Eso no occudió aqui / This Never Happened Here
experimental nonfiction video short. 7'42"
Collaboration between A Prison is No Shelter Media and El Comedor Communitario
Testimonies of survivors from the Halsted Avenue "shelter", where over 3,500 migrants are held in a decommissioned industrial warehouse
Morainic - field trip across the Bloomington Moraine
invitation poster, video still
A walk across the Bloomingon moraine exploring how geologic ways of seeing are subtended by structures of Indigenous erasure and the logics of property.
Black Snake Tour of Aurora
By Rozalinda Borcila, Ze Garcia, and Ulysses Diaz with Caracol Community Garden
Day-tripping through the racialized geographies and contested Indigenous landscapes, petroleum supply chains, financial infrastructures and spaces of resistance in the globalized suburb of Aurora, IL
Black Snake Tour of Aurora
By Rozalinda Borcila, Ze Garcia, and Ulysses Diaz with Caracol Community Garden
Black Snake Tour of Aurora (map, back side)
By Rozalinda Borcila, Ze Garcia, and Ulysses Diaz with Caracol Community Garden
Bubbles and Clouds, a dérive-ative
Map (front side) for walking series
On this field trip we strive for an analytic and sensorial interpretation of megadevelopment and financial markets. The trip focuses on cloud computing as a social technology (clouds), financial derivatives and the carceral structures that quietly subtend and entangle bubble and cloud
Anthropocene Age Trail
Walking Seminar in conjunction with "Meskonsing-Kansan," book and walk project.
Collaboration with Nicholas Brown and Lance Foster
Tracing glacial narratives as colonial modes of knowing across two public trails: The Ice Age Trail in Wisconsin, and the Glacial Edge Scenic Byway in Kansas.