Ballroom Marfa and Agave Festival Marfa presented Tlacuilcopa – a workshop and exploration of Nahuatl with artist and activist Fernando Palma Rodríguez at Ballroom Marfa.

Nahuatl is a widely-spoken indigenous language of Mexico and Central America that uses a writing system based on logograms – written characters and images that represent a word or phrase. While our familiar alphabetic writing employs a few dozen symbols, logographic writing make use of hundreds if not thousands of symbols.

Participants in the workshop learned about the structure and application of the Nahuatl writing system and then learned to create their own logograms. Rodríguez also shared his efforts to save this threatened language. Together with his family, the artist operates several NGOs that focus on teaching and preserving the language in Mexico.

Rodríguez’s artwork was on view in Ballroom’s galleries as part of the exhibition Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine.