Fulana is a Latina media collective from New York City founded in 2000 by Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, Lisandra Ramos-Grullón, Andrea Thome and Cristina Ibarra. Focusing on popular culture, and using parody and satire as a critical tool, Fulana's mock commercials, music videos, and direct action pieces explore themes that are relevant to Latino cultures in the U.S., experimenting with strategies to make visible what we're so often made to read between the lines. Fulana's bilingual aesthetic, which ranges from cable-access kitsch to Univisión tinsel, responds to the ways ideologies and identities are marketed and sold to us—and how we sell ourselves—through the mass media. The founding members write, direct, produce, and perform in Fulana's videos, which have been exhibited internationally in festivals, institutions, and art galleries, including the 2009 Havana Biennial, Exit Art in New York City, Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MACO) in Oaxaca. Fulana's video and direct action projects are available online through fulana.org, facebook.com/fulanation, YouTube, and MySpace, and they are also historically preserved in the permanent collections of the Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau in Havana, Cuba, and the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library at New York University. Encouraging young people to engage in critical thinking through parody, Fulana teaches workshops at universities across the United States, such as Yale University, Dartmouth College, Rutgers, and New York University. "Fulana"—derived from the Arabic word for "anyone"—is a popular term in Spanish and Portuguese that refers to an "imaginary or undetermined person," much like "Jane Doe" or "so-and-so."

View the artist profile (HIDVL)

Comment on this page