TBA21 first commissioned Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa to conceive an audio-visual work for the online platform st_age, launched during the Covid-19 pandemic. The result is an essay in five parts, accompanied by a research cluster about the Ch’olti Language, entitled Art and Vocabulary of Ch’olti Language, referring to the title of a manuscript written in 1695 by Friar Francisco Morán, in which this Spanish colonist documented the Ch’olti language while living in Guatemala. As an outcome of Morán’s advice, the Ch’olti-speaking Maya people were violently annihilated, and their homeland was depopulated by the military and missionary powers of the time.

His research lead further to the production of the sculpture Huertos de los ch'olti, taking inspiration from the “enchanted” gardens of the former Ch’olti-speaking territory in today’s Belize and Guatemala., consisting of a series of beaded curtains, each hanging from a branch, made of bronze and adorned with cacao, vanilla, and achiote fruits. These three cultigens were at the center of a complex pre-Hispanic agro-economic system among the Manche Ch’ol of the Maya Lowlands until the end of the seventeenth century

With the newly commissioned endeavor entitled Yeeb' Naufus, Ramírez-Figueroa is investigating the possibilities of re-establishing a grammar and phonetics of the extinct Manche language,

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s art ranges from performance and video, to sculpture, installation, and printmaking. It has encompassed investigations of dreams, architecture, abstraction, theater, and notions of the spiritual. Ramírez-Figueroa frequently explores historical narratives—especially the legacy of Guatemala’s brutal civil war (1960–96)—through the conditions of the body