Mexico City’s MUAC is a hub for sonic experimentation
Image credit: MUAC.
by Ambika Subra.
Mexico City has more museums than any other city in the world. Whether conceptual or commodified, contemporary art can be found in every colonia. But the seed of contemporary art lies in its debate, which is why one of the city’s most vital cultural gems sits not in a gallery district or a downtown corridor, but on the campus of UNAM. What sets El Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) apart in the Mexican museum landscape is its Espacio de Experimentación Sonora (EES), a room designed exclusively for experimental music. It offers more than a space for sound. It creates the conditions for deep listening. Its architecture invites not spectacle but study. It is a purpose-made environment for sonic research, where artists stretch time, distort history, and activate archives in ways that traditional exhibition formats rarely allow.
Since taking over its curatorship, Guillermo García Pérez has quietly transformed the EES into one of the most forward-thinking sonic spaces in Latin America. His curatorial approach is grounded in a sharp and timely critique: “We are currently in a moment where the avant-garde - as a guiding concept in the musical field - does not necessarily produce the most relevant works. Framing that search through a rigid scheme of delay-versus-progress is no longer effective if one seeks to explore works with political and historical significance.”
Rather than chase novelty for its own sake, García Pérez has opened the chamber to a different kind of sonic experimentation that operates at the intersection of politics, memory, and code - a “tension of fields.” Under his direction, the EES has hosted artists like Alva Noto, Laurie Spiegel, and Nicolás Jaar, each of whom explores sound as a method of historical reactivation. Jaar’s Radio Piedras, for instance, premiered an entirely new body of research that layered field recordings from mineral extraction zones in Latin America into a ghostly transmission about ecology and disappearance. The work was paired with a live concert that drew over 7,000 people to UNAM’s courtyard. Students stood in the fountain just to hear it. Spiegel’s algorithmic compositions moved through the space like digital folklore. Alva Noto’s signal geometries transformed planetary data into something emotional and strangely tactile.
Image credit: MUAC.
These exhibitions often extend beyond the walls of the chamber. They become full events with concerts, lectures, and open discussions that recast the museum not as a container for meaning but as a site for inquiry. The question is not only what we hear but how we listen. And more urgently, who gets to make sound in the first place.
That same ethos animates Saturn Spectrums, the latest commission at the EES by artist Leslie García. In this 45-minute sound installation, García summons the spirit of Sun Ra, blending archival fragments with AI-assisted processing and modular synthesis. Rehearsal hiss, static, and ambient room tone are woven together with movements from García’s own phone. These gestures act as portals, linking past and future through noise. The result is spectral and unstable. Time folds in on itself. Sun Ra’s voice flickers as if hovering in unfinished transmission.
Saturn Spectrums refuses historical resolution. It allows decay to remain audible and turns glitches into connective threads. The archive is no longer a memory bank but a feedback loop. It lives through interference. It resists clarity.
It’s this feedback loop that defines the current moment at MUAC’s sound chamber. In an era where many museums are rebranding their collections and narratives, the EES takes a different approach. It asks what stories live inside the distortion. What can be learned by listening to what was meant to be erased. And what new sonic languages become possible when the signal is left unpolished.
Saturn Spectrums will loop through September, but its resonance is not bound to the room. In García’s work, and throughout García Pérez’s curatorial direction, the archive does not sit still. It flickers. It mutates. It breaks. And from that rupture, something begins to sound.
The politics and poetics of aguas frescas
by Ambika Subra.
At markets, fondas, and sunlit plazas, glass vitroleras cluster together, their bellies filled with horchata, jamaica, tamarindo - each sweating under the weight of the day. Inside, a long-handled ladle stirs slowly, ready to be dipped and poured into waiting plastic cups. One ladle. Many hands. These aren’t just beverages - they’re rituals of circulation: sweet, spiced, and hydrating, but also quietly collective. To drink is to join a shared rhythm. Aguas frescas carry not only flavor, but memory, labor, and the social codes of everyday life.
At this year’s TONO Festival, artist and fashion designer Bárbara Sánchez-Kane transformed this gesture into a durational performance of time, sound, and community. Founded by curator Samantha Ozer, TONO is a nomadic festival of time-based media that connects international artists with Mexico’s contemporary art scene across unconventional venues. In its third edition, Aguas Frescas unfolded over two days in the courtyard of Museo Anahuacalli, proposing a new kind of “poetry fountain” - where bodies, liquids, and instruments formed a mutable, sonic ecology. Against Diego Rivera’s basalt temple of pre-Columbian artifacts, Sánchez-Kane offered horchata as both metaphor and medium.
‘Roma’ producer pushes craft, artistry amid Mexico’s creative boom
by Ambika Subra.
Mexico’s film industry has long been a wellspring of creativity, producing visionary filmmakers while remaining just outside the global spotlight. But some sense the center may be shifting. In February, Netflix announced a $1 billion commitment to Mexican productions over the next five years, raising the stakes and highlighting Mexico as a key figure in the future of global cinema. At Pimienta Films - the Oscar-winning production company behind Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Tatiana Huezo’s Noche de Fuego - that future isn’t simply about making more movies. It’s about making better ones, and building the artistic ecosystems that can carry Mexican cinema into its next era.
Few are better positioned to lead this shift than Nicolás Celis, Pimienta’s founder. Celis has helped define the shape of contemporary Mexican cinema. For him, the current moment is as urgent as it is expansive.
"Mexico is in a very vibrant position right now," Celis tells me. Production is at an all-time high, fueled by fiscal incentives and the influx of streamers setting up bases across Mexico City. "It’s the gateway between this new streaming economy and the rest of Latin America." Major studios are investing heavily - not just in infrastructure, but in securing a foothold in a market that’s growing rapidly in both content consumption and creative output.
“Horizontal vertigo” and the architecture of Pato
by Ambika Subra.
Juan Villoro now famously referred to Mexico City as a “horizontal vertigo” - a place that unfolds not upward but outward, a labyrinth of nonlinear, magical chaos. To live here is to get lost and found in equal measure. It’s a city where a last-minute lunch can shift your day, where you might follow a stranger into a new neighborhood and come out with a lifelong friend, or find yourself questioning everything because of a particular alleyway.
It was in this horizontal vertigo that I found myself having dinner with a close friend and renowned architect: Patricio “Pato” Galindo Chain.
To understand Pato's architecture is to understand how he inhabits his city. His work - spanning from the boutique Hotel Dama in Mexico City to the retreat Mi Cielo in Valle de Bravo - rarely announces itself with grandiosity. Instead, it collaborates with history, with time, with those who move through it. His motto: “Architecture is precisely the construction of a space by inhabiting it.”
How Tampico’s alien embrace transformed fear and uncertainty into hopeful resilience
by Ambika Subra.
Forget Roswell - if extraterrestrials have landed anywhere, it’s Tampico.
A port city on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, Tampico has been shaped by invasion - Spanish conquest, French occupation, oil booms that lured American investors, and even colonies of raccoons that spread across the beaches after migrating from the destroyed Casuarinas forest. In the 2010s, the city faced a darker invasion, one that turned Tampico into both a war zone and a cautionary headline. Cartel violence swept through the area. Entire families disappeared overnight. Military trucks patrolled the streets. A city-wide curfew emptied plazas and shuttered local businesses.
In Mexico, the extranjero - foreigner, outsider, alien - has long been a symbol of conquest, uncertainty, and fear. For Tampiqueños, the unknown has never been distant or abstract. It has arrived in waves, seizing power, land, and lives. And yet, despite a history of violent invasion, Tampico has refused to surrender to fear. Instead, it has rewritten the meaning of the extranjero, embedding it into collective consciousness. And in this rewritten mythology, the outsider is not a force of destruction, but protection. The alien - quite literally, the green figure with a large head and a UFO - is the extranjero that defines the city, not as an invader, but as a silent guardian.
For over 60 years, many Tampiqueños have believed in Amupac, an underwater alien base 1.3 kilometers off Miramar Beach, shielding the city from natural disaster. While other regions along the Gulf Coast - Veracruz, Texas, Louisiana - have suffered catastrophic hurricanes, Tampico has remained untouched since 1966. The reason, according to locals, isn’t meteorological luck. It’s extraterrestrial intervention.
Journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan, Mexico’s most famous alien investigator, traced the legend’s origins to an American tourist in the 1970s who claimed to have been abducted and taken to a submerged extraterrestrial city beneath the Gulf. Newspapers in Tampico and Ciudad Madero published the story as fact. Since then, with each hurricane that shifts course, belief in Amupac has only grown. Fishermen often report strange lights beneath the water. Radar interference remains unexplained. Unexplained objects hover over oil rigs. One local meteorologist interviewed by Vice News stressed there are several more terrestrial explanations for why a hurricane hasn’t hit Tampico since 1966. But many Tampiqueños remain convinced: something - or someone - is protecting them from true destruction.
Tampico’s aliens are not just a conspiracy theory or local legend. They are embedded in the city’s cultural fabric. Walk along the beaches, and you’ll see murals of UFOs, alien sculptures, and plush green companions sold at market stalls. Raccoons roam around a half-buried flying saucer on the beach. Every year, the city holds UFO conferences and a parade where residents dress as extraterrestrials, turning myth into collective history. Many make pilgrimages to Miramar Beach to meditate, hoping to connect with their unseen protectors.
The phenomenon has even led to structured research - most notably through la Asociación de Investigación Científica Ovni de Tamaulipas, an organization dedicated to studying UFO sightings and unexplained aerial phenomena in the region. Netflix is scouting the area for a documentary.
But the significance of this mythology isn’t aesthetic or for tourism. It’s about collective survival - a way to reclaim power in a place that has been shaped by forces beyond its control. Just as Tampico has endured colonial occupations and cartel wars, it has also found a way to turn the unknown - the fear of the extranjero - into something protective and hopeful.
The unknown is so often framed as a source of fear, but Tampico offers a rare counter-narrative: what we don’t understand can often protect us the most.
The existence of Amupac in Tampiqueños’ minds isn’t about scientific proof. It’s about something deeper - the way mythology gives people meaning, survival, and identity. Faith in these cosmic protectors has become a form of resilience. It is a way to reclaim control in a context where the unknown has often dictated the city’s fate. The belief in Amupac extends beyond aliens. It’s about the power to turn fear into protection, to transform uncertainty into faith.
And that’s the real power of Tampico’s aliens. Whether or not they exist is moot. Tampiqueños have made them real.
