Rozalinda Borcilă is a Romanian artist, researcher, and activist based in Chicago. She is interested in tracing the ways colonial violences are encoded in the making of everyday places. How do they coalesce around material extractions and flows of capital, around institutional grammars and forms of possession—but also around modes of feeling, modes of relation, and everyday experiences of being in place? Her current projects focus on glacial landscapes and wetland development sites.
Borcilă has exhibited internationally in the U.S., Europe, South Africa, and the Occupied Territories of Palestine. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Newberry Library Research Fellowship, 3Arts Award, Illinois Artist Fellowship, Chicago Filmmakers Grant, and Art Matters Award.
She is active in migrant solidarity and border abolition struggles and is a core member of NoShelter, an activist media project exploring migrant child detention in the U.S. and the efforts to dismantle it. She works in museums, universities, art centers, community spaces, squats, and in the streets.
At MacDowell, Borcilă explored different video strategies for interpreting a research archive of documents, maps, three-dimensional models, and video/audio recordings related to the meanings and politics of glacial imaginaries. Her past work related to this topic was awarded a research fellowship at the Newberry Library and was featured in an artist’s book she co-authored with Nicholas Brown and Lance Foster.
