Giselle Fausto, MexiCali Biennial x Whittier College Poet StoryLab
Welcome to the DPSA is not only a parafictional art project. It is the product of an internship model that treats professional practice itself as a site of speculative world-building.
Developed during Giselle Fausto’s internship with the MexiCali Biennial through Whittier College’s Poet StoryLab, the project emerged alongside her hands-on work inside the MXCL BNL LAB. While supporting the organization’s soon-to-launch website, redesigning internal signage systems, and creating public-facing vinyl decals, Fausto was also embedded within the everyday infrastructures of exhibition-making: wayfinding, branding, visitor experience, and institutional communication. These systems of display, mediation, and access became both her classroom and her conceptual material.
“What feels hypothetical in class becomes real in the lab,” Fausto explains in a Whittier College feature. “I get to talk to the people viewing my work.” This proximity between design labor, audience interaction, and institutional space directly shaped Welcome to the DPSA.This fictional government agency dedicated to investigating, capturing, and exhibiting paranormal entities.Modeled after militarized research institutions, museums, and entertainment complexes, DPSA operates through a public-facing “learning center” called the EXPLORMOR Center, complete with fabricated artifacts, promotional graphics, gift-shop merchandise, and “classified” documents.
Fausto’s project draws directly from her internship environment. Her fluency with signage systems, public interfaces, and visual branding enabled her to convincingly construct the bureaucratic aesthetics of DPSA. Body-cam footage of a La Llorona sighting, advertisements for a captured Chupacabra, toy weapons sold as souvenirs, and UFO postcards available for purchase all mirror the language of museums, science centers, and security institutions. The result is an immersive fiction that exposes how exhibition spaces quietly function as theaters of power—sites where fear is aestheticized, knowledge is curated, and surveillance is naturalized as education.
For the StoryLab, the partnership with the MexiCali Biennial reflects a shared commitment to Latinx storytelling, community-embedded research, and professional pathways grounded in creative practice. “They really tailored the internship to support and develop her interests,” notes Associate Professor Kate Palmer Albers in a Whittier College article. The article also explains how Fausto credits the experience with expanding both her technical skills and her artistic voice. “Graphic design has a balance between creativity and methodical thinking. That challenge keeps me engaged.”
Welcome to the DPSA will also be featured in the upcoming PARA/normal Borders Open Call and research materials release scheduled for launch on Friday, February 13, 2026.