UHM (Unidad de Hinvestigación & Morbosidades Temporales) is a collective researching the concept of time and the creation of different devices to approach it differently in every iteration. UHM is an on-going process of coding, reflection and live collaborative work which purpose is to affect bodies. UHM members and research centres are not fixed and their work takes place in different parts of the American continent since 2017. Each project works with a different group of artists from different national constructs and indigenous cosmovisions, although the core group is integrated by artist, researcher, and curator Rolando Hernández (Oaxaca / Mexico City) and sound artist, time researcher, musician and programmer Alejandro Franco Briones (Mexico City // Hamilton, Ca).

UHM’s first collaboration was an exploration of digital scoring devices presented at Santiago de Chile. A digital multi-modal score was performed unsuccessfully with the intention of producing a calendar. Second project was a broad collaboration with Nanc-In-A-Can, Ruido 13 and Umbral which took place in Mexico City (2019). A 90 minute long exploration of time concepts took the form of a live coded/improvised opera of a running person besieged by 13 time-keeping human/mechanic/digital computers. In 2020, they created Dos Sures along with Diego Villaseñor; this project was an algorithmic sound documentary which was part of FilMishMish, the 72 hour sonic protest hosted by Radio Alhara against the annexation of a part of the West Bank.

UHM’s archive is composed by concepts, images, quotes, sounds, movies, scores, and experiences that deal with the notion of time. For this iteration of the archive we are proposing that the most relevant lens to focus time and space are Nahuatl culture traditional knowledges. The notion of archive is not the one of a fixed space with records inside, but a complex entanglement of philosophies that penetrate our bodies first, and maybe afterwise, produce archiving thoughts and impulses. In this way, we believe our archive should only live through the memory of others. Through listening, observing and present-tense decision making we will speculate about timelines and historiographies creating a narrative that is unfamiliar to a “common-sense” expectation hoping to seed in the imagination of the audience the UHM archive.

They premiered In Xiuh Ce Amatl, an experimental live coded documentary on the nahuatl concept of time for the Network Music Festival and for Campamento Extendido Cyberpunk Post-Ternura summer sessions in the year 2020. The documentary format inherently produces specific ways of seeing that are often confronted with otherness. In the documentary proposed, ambiguous conceptions of time neglected by modernity are not the object of observation but the point of view that reflects and confronts Western conceptions of time. In this project, time is an excuse to talk about history, Nahuatl philosophies, music and their entanglements. We are hoping that through careful observation the documentary will allow us to speculate about other timelines where we watch documentaries as a side effect of reading subtitles.