Marisa Fulper Estrada is a Colombian-American designer / artist / writer / thinker enamored with the mundane and the surreal. They explore cycles, knotted balls of string, 1° shifts, 10° shifts, echoes, vessels, grey space, self-understanding, and the unlimited potential of shared futures. These explorations manifest as comics, sculptures, zines, facilitated spaces, and collaborative pieces. They are from Ann Arbor, Michigan, have lived in Copenhagen, Mexico City, Detroit, Berlin, and currently call Toronto home. Marisa has a collaborative design practice with Phil Woollam called Faun Workshop.

Current rabbit holes: Knitting, Quails, & Cixin Liu.

Circling thoughts: Nature as Teacher, Creativity + Essentialism = Craft, The Power of Magical Realism, Alters & Retablos, Queer Futurity, Softness, Roughness, De(Re)Constructing, Laborer as Publisher, Collective Practice, Subsistence Farming

MAFULPER@GMAIL.COM
@MARISATIIVA

An assortment of freelance work.

Beer label for Bierhalle for Pride themed beer. Collaborative design with Phil Woollam. 06.2022.

Event poster for Xpace Cultural Centre. 06.2022.

Pride Zine for Blank Street Coffee in NYC. 24 pages. Digital printing. Cover illustration made collaboratively with Phil Woollam. 06.2022.

Cover illustration for Cigale Magazine in Montreal. 1.2022.

Event posters for Bricks & Glitter Festival. 08.2021.

Event poster for Xpace Cultural Centre. 08.2020

Poster made for Vans for Latinx Heritage month with an accompanied audio piece. The design centers on Colombian produce that brings memory of family and love for me. My abuelito was a potato geneticist who worked Colombia and Peru so the illustratioin is also in honor of him. These were posted on the street in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and New York City. Additionally they were sold in select Vans stores. I also spoke on a panel with other artist's about the work and our experiences as Latinx folks.

Poster. Ann Arbor, MI, US. / 8.2020.

Sewn sculpture explorations

Found and bought fabric. Toronto, ON, CA. / 6.2020 - current.

Weekly dribble of personal insights / sad boy existentialism in comic form.

Digital comix. Toronto, ON, CA. / 06.2019 - ongoing

Having worked at Blok Design for almost 2 and a half years, I learned to take a project from conceptualization to production. It was a multitude of jobs in a day - from design and art direction to writing and project management to social media and PR - being a multi-tasker and team player. Design is about humanity so communicating with the client, suppliers, manufacturers, and printers is imperative to create with quality and an eye for detail. Working in a small studio meant constant learning, agile movement, and exploring what's next.

We designed packaging for plant-based health food brand JOYA, creating a clear, joyful information system that could work across their variety of products. Over the past 2 years, I have designed various branded materials and packaging keeping true to the brand design.

Made at Blok Design / My role : design, project management, art direction, PR / Toronto, CA. / 05.2019 - 02.2021

Origen México originates from the most profound love of land and identity. It is a convergence of talents, passions, thoughts, textures, flavours, creative forces, and unique sensibilities that have formed and illuminated Mexican culture. From the materiality of carbon paper—the nearly discarded—to the impossibility of a typeface that has yet to be launched, this book reaches across time and space to deliver narratives that are multiple, rich, and authentic. This book honours the inherent beauty of the country and gives immense gratitude to those who have moved us to see further and deeper. All of the profits from the book support accessible education in Mexico.

Made at Blok Design / My role : image curation, design, project management, PR / Toronto, ON. / 07-08.2019

Paying homage to famous racer Alberto Ascari, Toronto Italian eatery Ascari is grounded in their love of racing and food. The identity refresh centers on layered language of racer car graphics, 1950's inspired typography, and the racer’s signature blue.

Made at Blok Design / My role : design, copywriting, PR / Toronto, CA. / 05-06.2019

Inspired by rituals and the beauty of the experience, we developed cannabis products, packaging, and a website for F8/F8TE, 48North’s new product line. Exploring materially and longevity, we designed breaking both functional and aesthetic stereotypes while making everyday pieces that will last.

Made at Blok Design / My role : packaging and website design, art direction / Toronto, CA. / 11-12.2018

Based in Chile, Territoria shapes the built environment with an expansive vision: creating large scale real estate developments focused on bettering the quality of life of those who encounter them. Celebrating their grounded values and philosophy, the redesign of the firm’s brand identity flows witha subtle nuance of tonalities and clarity of vision.

Made at Blok Design / My role : design / Toronto, CA. / 10.2018

A family of suspended devil angel sculptures. The dual nature plays on ideas liberation & self-policing, hybridity, gender binary, and religion.

Paper Maché, Trash, Acrylic, Wire. Toronto, ON, CA. / 1.2020 - 2.2021. Film Photography by Nico Hormazabal.

This series of sculptures started from a need to create physically, spiraling into a deep exploration of quite literally exploring my body corporally and spiritually as I questioned my body and its gender. Drawing on pre-Colombian art forms and Peruvian retablos I grew up with, these sculptures serve as conduits for my emotions and self-projections and spiritual shrines to connect with myself and in doing so, my ancestors.

Paper Maché, Trash, Acrylic, Wire. Toronto, ON, CA. / 11.2018 - 1.2020. Film and Studio Photography by Nico Hormazabal.

A 24 pages of shared conversation with roommate Bird Friend, Hormiga expresses their unshakable love for Kate from Lost.

Risograph. Run of 150. Made in collaboration with Chris Withers. Detroit, MI, US. / 08.2018

Little crumbs of Hormiga tangents gathered into one stockpile

Urgency Reader 2 by Queer.Archive.Work. Comix spread. Risograph.

Urgency Reader by Queer.Archive.Work. Comix spread. Risograph.

Issues Magazine: Technical Issues. Comix spread. Risograph.

Posters that never manifested off the computer. Pre-cursor to the Diario Comix.

Risographed poster presenting the Hormiga project. Run of 25.

Photos from the archive of the original paper mache Hormiga head. Marisa as Hormiga. Chris Withers as bird friend.

Stuck inside due to the pandemic, I created 2 short comics about time travelling sea slugs. Made of one 8.5 x 11, the zine folds acordion style to reveal one comic on either side. I made this with the intention of mailing loved ones a little cheer during such times of uncertainity.

Risograph. Run of 100. Toronto, ON, CA / 04.2020

The second publication by Third Phase Cleaning Press continues in the vein of found internet content, this time centered on the work of architectural photographer Julius Schulman, buried in an early internet archive. Inspired by multi-layered narratives and temporary homes, Weekend Getaway includes abstracted writings by Chris and myself, pony loverz adds to turn a lonely weekend into an unforgetable one, and a website extension still underway.

Limited run of 40 copies. DOWNLOAD DIGITAL PUBLICATION. Detroit, MI, US + Toronto, ON, CA / 08-11.2019. Collaborative produced with Chris Withers

An annual year-end publication with interviews from fellow artists, designers, and writers reflecting on the year gone by and their hopes for the new one. The project is facilitated to create collective reflection and project futures, big or small, into shared creative-minded space.

Bye 2017 is a printed publication, consisting of in-depth interviews with university friends, reflecting back on a year in Trump’s America, on new spaces post-grad, on favorite moments, and where we hoped to go in the coming year.

Limited print run for contributors. Ann Arbor, MI, US / 11-12.2017.

After a year full of new spaces and friends, Bye 2018 centered around created virtual space and self-authorship taking form in a shared Google Slides. Contributors could respond to the question, design their slide, comment on others, and re-edit. My sole role was facilitating the space for reflection.

Digital publication. LIVE PUBLICATION. Toronto, ON, CA (+ everywhere) / 11-12.2018.

The previous versions of BYE ____ used written language as the main method of communication. For BYE 2019, I wanted to focus on a more abstract method of visioning: imagery. I asked contributors to provide an image that represented one thing they hoped to bring with them into the New Year. It could be their image (or not), real (or not), photo (or not). As images are up to interpretation, layers of meaning could be subtracted from a submission. My role was facilitating the prompt and designing the publication itself.

Digital Publication. DOWNLOAD DIGITAL PUBLICATION. Toronto, ON, CA / 11.2019-01.2020.

Inspired by an online forum post, Into the Flood is a 24 page publication of visual experiments that compliment Xorkoth's odyseey of taking the world's strongest hallucinogenic to kick his opiate addiction. Intrigued by the divide of high and low literature and value systems of printed vs. internet content, the goal was to create a tangible experience for this well-written story and put it into physical space.

Limited run of 50 copies. DOWNLOAD DIGITAL PUBLICATION. Detroit, MI, US / 07-08.2018. Collaborative produced with Chris Withers

For 4 months, I lived and worked at Savvy's Mexico City design studio. There I worked on branding projects as well as a book design and preparing files for production. Living in another country with a different language than my native one was an incredible experience of navigating clear communication in English and Spanish, as well as gaining a new expanse of visual and cultural references.

Gourmet Fournier is a boutique chocolate shop in Mexico City, making edible arrangments for high-end clients. With this identity, I proposed a sleek playful typographic approach tempered by muted colors to create a unique voice for the brand.

Made at Savvy. Roma Norte, CDMX, MX / 04-05.2018.

Calatea is a new contemporary housing development in Mexico. Pulling from the architectural designs, the stair of the L mimics the multi-tiers of the homes. Since the development is named for a flower, I designed a floral emblem that also can turn into a pattern.

Made at Savvy. Roma Norte, CDMX, MX / 03-04.2018.

A comic of an anthropomorphic Chicanx banana peel who has hyper-real interactions addressing its existentialism, humanity, and the current political climate.

Risograph Comic & Poster. Run of 100. Roma Norte, CDMX, MX / 04-05.2018.

A series of two zines drawn from sights in my neighborhood in Mexico City. Playing on the nature of tourism and the gentrification of foreigners into the space itself, these illustrated pages play on wealth disparities.

Zine & Poster. Roma Norte, CDMX, MX / 03-04.2018.

A series of 80+ handmade zines drawn over a 5 month period, serving as a scattered diary of abstracted moments in my life, stemming from frustrations and disillusionment of societial structures. RAW was born from the need to communicate this discrepancy I feel in the space I occupy and the space I wish to create, one that questions structures of power and opens conversations for creative thinking and change, and the need to release the pent up language and visuals swirling in my head,collected and inspired by everyday events. The content derives from the moment, the space, and people around me there in that moment allowing the id to fight capitalism’s functionality, to cut away the curated self, and to foster countercultural and unconventional thinking.

Zine & Poster. Ann Arbor + Detroit, Michigan, US / 07.2017-02.2018.