Disappearing Until It Clears: Nature, Ambient and Silence

I

Like billions of other human beings, I'm wired and exhausted. I picture myself as an electron, tracing orbits around a nucleus. Like a juggler with balls, clubs, swords, fire. Like a solar system getting hit by a meteor shower. Maybe that meteor is carrying the chemical elements for life, but man, what a strain.

I read my ultra-short breathing like a message: "time to shift into another speed regime." For that I need to get out of the outside hole: go somewhere with a low human presence, where beings far older than hominids abound, like mountains and meltwater rivers; where I can pay attention to non-digital flows of information. Slow down until things clear up.

I need a place where transmitting doesn't equal talking, and attending doesn't equal listening. Being silenced can be a repressive act, but wanting to keep quiet can be an act of care, even of self-defense. I already picked the place: the zone where the Patagonian plateau meets the Andes, around Corcovado, Chubut.

II

February 6, 2026. We get to Corcovado. I spend two days sighing. Like I'm deflating. Deep, tectonic sighs. With each sigh I get a wider perception of my body. The short breathing was nasal; these exhalations are pulmonary. I inhale really deep and feel my ribs pressing against my skin. It gives me a pleasure I wasn't looking for. If we don't know what a body can do, it's partly because we don't know where there's an unexplored erogenous zone.

We get to Corcovado. I spend two days sighing. Like I'm deflating. Deep, tectonic sighs. With each sigh I get a wider perception of my body.

I look at the river and sigh. I walk a trail and sigh. I make myself a mate to look at the mountain and sigh. All day like that. From the outside it might look like a health problem, but from the inside it's a sign of health.

This health is being built on a gesture that seems simple but is socially difficult, almost a privilege: disappearing for a while. Suspending habits of movement, swapping the familiar for the unknown, going to places I have no images of, solving problems and reaching conclusions I can't anticipate, not thinking about the things I think about all year, and not thinking them the way I think them during the year. Not looking at my phone too much. Writing at another speed. Fording a river for two hours, meltwater up to my waist, trying not to wreck my ankles. Learning to cook a salmon. Identifying edible mushrooms. Writing about things I don't usually write about. Watching a horse until it feels like the first time in my life I've ever seen a horse.

III

February 9. My mood has changed noticeably. I breathe deep. I'm calm. I feel no need to take care of pending stuff. I think about the future and about what's still to be done, but it doesn't show up as commitments, threats or promises demanding immediate fulfillment. It shows up as a playing field: I toy with ideas, projects, things I'd like to do in the coming years. I speculate or, as I like to say paraphrasing Stanislaw Lem, I "weigh possibilities." I accompany processes along their possible drifts.

I think about the relationship between disappearance, calm and futurization. Nothing to do with "living in the moment": I don't feel encapsulated in the present, but involved in a recombination of the actual with the possible. To extend the physiological metaphors: I'm inducing an oxygenation.

But I also think sideways and in the middle of what surrounds me. I impose that exercise on myself. Textures, smells, sounds. I touch the trees. I follow the flight of birds. I see maras leap out of nowhere and bolt. I hear the undergrowth crunch under my steps. I hear Paz humming as she walks ahead of me. I let the surroundings advance over me. As novelty, as affect, as a sign of how immense the planet is and proof of the millions of things I have no idea about, not even an image.

IV

I think a lot about disappearing. It imposes itself on me. I reduce it to its minimal sense: dis-appearing. To dis-appear you have to have appeared. Before appearing, things aren't disappeared. To disappear is the destruction of appearance, of presence. Not showing up. There are extreme forms, like dying, which means no longer being able to show up before anything or anyone, or being abducted, which implies a violence of extraction (which makes me think of the continuity between the military dictatorship and extractivism). My disappearing, on the other hand, is regional and finite. It doesn't destroy appearing as such, but one form of appearance. I want to appear with other characteristics. And for that I turn to seeking new conditions, new affections.

Over the years I've realized that when I want to disappear, I look for wide-open places. The Southern Sea, the desert, the Puna, Patagonia. Never cities (which I seek out when I want to speed up): always geological giants, sparsely populated. My disappearing takes human gazes very much into account; it seeks to stop appearing before them. But that doesn't reduce the mountain or the sea to scenery or mere witnesses.

My disappearing is regional and finite. It doesn't destroy appearing as such, but one form of appearance. I want to appear with other characteristics.

At Lago Espolón, Chile, I wrote: Why do I turn to enormity? Why am I interested in getting close to and meddling with giants that move at non-human speeds, sometimes extremely slow, sometimes extremely fast? Enormous witnesses put me on a scale that lightens me, even in critical moments. A few years ago I went to the Argentine Andean region to make important decisions. To do it, I headed into the mountains. I walked all day and slept in refuges. When I came down, I took a bus and spent a week alone in a little cabin facing Lake Futalaufquen, in Los Alerces National Park. Hermit mode. Solitude and decision. A human-poor environment so introspection could unfold. Because my introspection doesn't only mean going inward, but being in another outside.

This year, when I don't feel the weight of a big decision but the exhaustion of an endless, anxiety-inducing year with tsunamis of government crap arriving one after another, which kept honing that short, fast breathing (watch your breathing: it's full of data), immensity embraces me and I let myself be embraced and I start losing my shape.

V

I'm euphoric on a plane that has nothing to do with eloquence. It's a bodily expressive euphoria. I can walk for many hours without stopping, or stay still just as long. This disappearing doesn't mean agitation or standing still, but moving in another key, tuned to other notes. The meaning of tiredness changes, my notion of discomfort changes. Otherwise it's inexplicable that I can walk almost ten kilometers with my feet full of burrs that made it through my boots and are wrecking my ankles and insteps; or that I'd climb a rise whose summit looks like a labyrinth of caves where, I was warned, there might be pumas; or that I'd sit staring at a bend in the river for a very long time.

In that lateral movement (I mean: a movement more attentive to what happens in immediacy) I discover myself as a tissue that keeps stretching. I don't suffer the tear; on the contrary. It empowers me. It makes me connect more with the surroundings than with my own action. Being in what isn't one's own: that's the disappearing I'm talking about.

I don't want to die, but I'm not afraid of dying either. I tell Paz: I could die here and it wouldn't be so bad.

VI

I no longer know what day it is and I don't need to. I sit down to look at a mountain. Cabeza de Indio. A gorgeous 1,600-meter formation. I was told the owners are some Argentine millionaires. They didn't tell me their names. They didn't want to tell me. Only that you can't go without their permission because you have to pass through some gates. Unbelievable. Some son of a bitch bought a mountain. He doesn't live there, he probably never goes. Maybe there's some exploitable mineral. Every argument strikes me as bullshit. The history of capitalism is one of the most absurd there's ever been. Capitalism is as unjust as it is absurd. I think about those owners and they fill me with as much hatred as pity. I look at the mountain and can't believe it isn't available to anyone who wants to walk it. In Patagonia the fenced-off surfaces are so vast that sometimes they create the optical illusion of not existing, but it's a matter of scale. I think about how private property is a limit to that force that pushes me to think sideways, to dissolve, to blur. It's a wall that rejects that movement. Capitalism is a huge operation to limit the possibilities of appearing but also—and I feel like I understand this now—of disappearing. Class struggle is also a struggle over the conditions and possibilities of not being there. And even though the logics of capital have shifted from confinement to control, which is like saying from managing perimeters to managing trajectories, in order to intensify movement, what still beats at its center is the imposition of ways of being there and ways of not being there. Valorization and/or death.

VII

I wasn't always interested in the possibilities of disappearing. But today, even with reservations, I take them into account. And I read phenomena as signs: it can't be a coincidence that all this coincides with the most ambient musical moment of my life. A moment that started right before the pandemic and hasn't closed yet. During the 2020 lockdown I concluded that I was listening to a lot of ambient because I experienced it as a kind of acoustic sanitary barrier. A way to temper worries, to make peace with suspension; to make room to face what had to be faced.

Lately I've been listening to a lot of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Iu Takahashi, Eric Olsen, Lumtz, Loscil, Laraaji, Federico Durand, neosika, Slow Attack Ensemble and titans of the genre like Eno, Pauline Oliveros, Suzanne Ciani, Aphex Twin and William Basinski. There are others, suggested by the platforms, that I listen to without stopping to see who they are. Ambient is a very rich genre, full of instrumental and timbral variations, packed with textures and musical colors. It even manages to produce differences where there seem to be only repetitions: drone is the most obvious case.

Ambient is a very rich genre, full of instrumental and timbral variations, packed with textures and musical colors.

What's more, its places of production become aesthetic marks: Japanese ambient differs from Swedish ambient; the ambient of the Argentine Andean region has tonalities you won't find in the English stuff. Look at it this way: the Corcovado river has a unique murmur, like the Amazon, like the Danube. Since it converses with sound art and field recordings, ambient is a genre that honors its name; it is, precisely, environmental. It listens to its surroundings, it seeks to re-produce them or to produce out of them.

As I said: if during the pandemic I wrote an essay saying that I experienced ambient as a sanitary barrier, lately I listen to it as exit music. Exit from what? Exit toward where? Foucault spoke of heterotopias to name those other-places that are here, among us. Places that aren't utopias, but escapes into different lives. A thinking sideways. Lives that can last minutes. Ambient is, more than a soundtrack, a passageway into my recent heterotopias.

Ambient is like a mountain because it's a passage to a place where what you look for, or find, is a sense of the impersonal. A disappearance, a decentering, a tear. Hence the cosmic, the animal, the insect, the mineral, the organic, the machinic in ambient. It's above and below the individual. Like a viscera, like a power cable, like a tardigrade. Hence, too, the scarcity of voices and singing in the works. Ambient is music very well suited to disappearing, to pushing toward a minimum of intervention. From a point of view that anchors its values in will, centrality, protagonism (in other words, in heroism), this may sound terrifying, but if you value pre-disposition, relaxation, reception, here there's something instead of nothing.

VIII

In the terms of this essay, disappearing is enacting a change of environment and agency. It's an exercise in induction. Closer to dropping acid than to going on vacation. Re-environing yourself, reconfiguring your relationship with your surroundings and with yourself, exposing yourself to different affections and sensibilities, drawing on knowledge and memories that maybe were never activated, opening the space of the possible, opening the space of the unexpected.

To disappear is to produce a shift in the spectrum of the possible. A leap, a passage. Today, when “the possible” has become an advertising slogan and a vector of the speculative, security-obsessed mode of domination, withdrawing can be a weapon in what the fellow editors of this magazine call “the cognitive war” which, at least in part, consists of a discourse of possibilities and appearances.

In disappearing, as in Lars Von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, the range of available resources shrinks; there are resources that are no longer available, that are off limits. Self-imposed prohibitions. But in a scarce medium there is also invention, because there is the possibility of seeing possibilities where none were detected before. As in ambient music, where it is often minor variations, or repetitive sounds, that generate a monotonous yet rich landscape.

The desire to disappear seems to resonate with that feature of ambient: withdrawing not to impoverish yourself, but to enrich yourself through subtraction. A bit like what Francois Jullien says about ancient Chinese music: in it, silence is conceived as all possible sounds.

IX

Lately I’ve been running into literary, artistic and cinematic works that lay out what I would call a will to disappear. Works that, I think, speak of a current desire to lose forms, habits, relationships, horizons, in order to gain something: ways of perceiving time, of projecting, calculating, exchanging, existing.

Flight has always been a form of promise. A paradise in the negative, a paradise about which nothing is known except that it won’t be this place. “Closing up, I’m getting the hell out,” said the signs in 2001. “Closing off the crap, I’m getting out of everything,” they might say today. As the protagonist of Juan José Becerra’s Toda la verdad might have said, the man who one day walks out of the office and starts walking, and walks, and walks. Until the city is left behind and another world appears. Or in Lengua y civilización, Fernando Katz’s unpublished novel, in which the character returns to places that left marks on his life, in order to convert those marks into other marks, into something else, and from there head toward dissolution, toward oblivion as an ontological embrace. Toward something that could even be called peace. An elemental, atheist reconversion that leads him into impersonality.

The desire to disappear cuts across classes. The privilege lies in the times and places available for disappearing. That’s why the impossibility of disappearing also has class markings. And it is a decisive source of today’s afflictions and suffering. Few things are more painful than wanting to leave and not being able to. The sense of sacrifice is born precisely there, as a way of giving another meaning to that malaise; that’s also where desperation, dejection and impotence grow.

The desire to disappear cuts across classes. The privilege lies in the times and places available for disappearing. That’s why the impossibility of disappearing also has class markings.

When we’re in a situation where we feel trapped, a kind of asphyxia sets in. Not being able to breathe, says Bifo Berardi, is the dominant sensation in our capitalist condition, which hyper-pressurizes, pushes universal competition and kills the poor and the racialized by asphyxiation, while pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thinning out the air and making breathing harder. Millions of human beings breathing shallow.

X

Trenque Lauquen, the extraordinary film directed by Laura Citarella and written by her and Laura Paredes, tells the story of a desire for flight and disappearance. Its protagonist, Laura, first leaves the big city. Then she leaves her boyfriend. Shortly afterward she leaves the small town that gives the film its title (which, by the way, also refers to a geological body, since Trenque Lauquen means “round lagoon” in mapundungun). Her presence before other humans keeps retracting. Fewer and fewer people can testify to her existence. Laura is disappearing. Her sense of presence changes, and so do the witnesses to that presence.

Laura disappears, but not like that compulsive emigrant (Lewkowicz dixit) who heads to Ezeiza to go do in another country what he can no longer do here. Her way of doing it isn’t going somewhere else to look for what she already had; nor is it going somewhere to intensify her presence before others. Nor is it dying. Laura, instead, begins to dissolve into the countryside. She gradually blends in with the earth and the plants. She becomes landscape. She becomes surroundings. She becomes, precisely, ambient. As if we were to say: she tends to become mineral.

As if you became the mountain; as if you could perceive like the mountain narrated by Ci Xin Liu: “What was the human world in the eyes of the mountain? Perhaps just something it saw during an idle afternoon. First, some small living beings appeared on the plain. After a while they multiplied, and after another while they erected anthill-like structures that quickly took over the region. The structures glowed from within and some of them gave off smoke. After another while, the lights and the smoke disappeared, and the little beings vanished and their structures collapsed and were covered by sand. And that was all.” To disappear: the art of becoming a mountain.

XI

Gabriel Tarde was a French sociologist of the early twentieth century interested in the relations between the capacity to invent and the capacity to repeat and imitate that define humans. Capacities that aren’t contradictory but necessary to each other.

Published this year by Cactus, the novel Fragmento de historia futura, written by Tarde in 1896, is not a typical work of sociology. It’s a work of science fiction in which the population of the Earth, unable to live on the surface because of a series of cosmic and climatic phenomena that render it uninhabitable, invents an underground world. That world is very different from ours. It’s a fairer world, more associative, more solidary. From the Sun to sol-idarity. It’s the story of a people that, in order to improve, had, under catastrophic conditions, to become invisible, to go underground. And in that process, what was left behind was an enormous swath of the biological kingdom. In the depths there are no plants, no trees, no large animals. Human beings lose that environment, but not everything is lost: their inventiveness manages to connect them in new ways with the possibilities of the mineral. Possibilities that, from the standpoint of biology, seem fewer, but turn out to be many, enough, and the necessary ones, to configure a society more just than the one that existed amid the evolutionary abundance of life on the surface. Tarde leaves a question hanging that today, under conditions of ecological crisis, resonates: what if justice also meant losing?

Fragmento sounds like a kind of degrowthism avant la lettre, in which inventiveness is not inhibited (it’s not a John Zerzan-style primitivism) but reconfigured and reoriented under new principles. It sounds harsh, but the novel seems to say that sometimes a good catastrophe is needed to produce justice. As the tango goes: “First you have to know how to suffer, then to love, then to leave, and at last to walk without a thought,” which, read in the light of the ideas in this article, sounds a bit like a strategy for disappearance.

Tarde leaves a question hanging that today, under conditions of ecological crisis, resonates: what if justice also meant losing?

I can almost read the history of the Vietnam War in the novel by Tarde, a native of a country that colonized Vietnam for nearly a century. Bombs flying every which way on the surface, while in the Vietcong’s tunnels a more just principle of existence was being built, which was also a principle of confrontation. Maybe that’s the great difference between a tunnel and a trench. The trench is waiting and lying in wait. The tunnel is production. The trench is a parenthesis in appearing; the tunnel is a new relation between disappearing and appearing.

XII

There’s not much point in reducing a conjuncture to a single meaning or force (which is why I don’t talk about an era), but we can say that today there exists a desire to disappear. Let’s not get confused: this isn’t about abandoning politics, commitment, concern for others. The desire is of another order. It’s almost a strategy, so that there can be, or can once again be, politics, commitment, concern for others. It’s a bringing into the open of disconnections that already exist. Of the difficulties standing in the way of desired connections. It isn’t a cause, it’s an effect.

It’s almost a strategy, so that there can be, or can once again be, politics, commitment, concern for others. It’s a bringing into the open of disconnections that already exist.

Maybe this is one possible reading of that tremendous novel Los Pichiciegos. In a just war fought for unjust reasons, the pichiciegos don’t want to die and so they desert. They build a life on the edge of the war. They’re antiheroes, but they’re also hospitable, benevolent, understanding. Like the Vietnamese soldiers, they build their lair underground. In fact, the first edition, put out by Ediciones de la Flor, was titled Los Pichy-cyegos. Visiones de una batalla subterránea. Unlike the Vietnamese, they don’t expect to defeat the enemy by violent means. They know they’re not capable of it. They’re smarter than the heroes, who confuse dying with winning. The traps of transcendence. The pichiciegos aren’t pacifists, they do nothing to end the war. They’re peaceful, rather; they wait for it to end, they live off it and alongside it. What’s unsettling is that, beneath that figure so unbearable to a warrior ethos, their presence paradoxically takes part in the end of the war. Their desertion, their withdrawal, their disappearance makes a difference that their presence would not have made.

XIII

In the early 2000s, novels came out like Rafael Pinedo’s Plop, or Pedro Mairal’s counter-history La guerra del desierto, which tell the story of societies that disappear. In the case of Plop, an endless rain eats away at the possibilities of life, just as Tarde’s solar storms ate away at those possibilities in Fragmento de historia futura, life encapsulated in a tribal existence more cruel than senseless. In Mairal, unlike in Tarde, there’s no flight to another plane but a dismantling of the planes, a collapse. But in both, individuals persist. So much so that Plop, the character, and María, the protagonist of La guerra del desierto, make it through the entire story. Another good example would be Salvador Benesdra’s El traductor, which narrates what might have looked like a transition but ends up being an annihilation, a mode of absolute, or definitive, transition.

In all three cases, social relations gradually fall apart; but, in spite of everything, something like a world emerges in which individuals persist. As if the world couldn’t affect them enough to make them lose a coherence, an interest, a horizon. Even in that tale of decline that is 76-89-03 you experience something like an insistence against a shifting backdrop. Or in Pizza, Birra, Faso. Or in Okupas. Hell, in 2000 we went to therapy en masse on television, every Tuesday night, watching Vulnerables. And I remember myself reading Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things in 2002.

Today, by contrast, I’ve just finished Tentacle, by Rita Indiana, Vayasí, by Pereyra Estabani, The City & the City, by China Miéville, Include Me Out, by María Cristoff, and the Xenogenesis trilogy, by Octavia Butler. I realize that none of those books narrate worlds falling apart but rather mutant individualities, a crisis of limits, an explosion of times (so different from the reverse linearity of La guerra del desierto). Somewhere between the fantastic and the uncanny, reality never quite gets understood, it always has one more layer, a layer impossible to anticipate, a layer with a logic of its own. In that sense, despite everything, the notion of a possible world, whatever literary form it takes, is, in the end, a world. But that world demands, imposes, profound alterations on those who inhabit it. Disappearing is one moment of that alteration.

If revolution is the process by which a social position (the working class) carries out a series of actions that, by modifying the conditions of existence, end up eliminating that very position (abolishing labor and exploitation), then disappearing would also seem to be a strategy for the self-elimination of a social position.

XIV

On June 5, 2026, the Indio Solari died. I cried all day long, in a way that was more oceanic than riverine: in waves. As the days went by, I arrived at an unexpected conclusion, one that connected that death with this text: with Solari, an artist of disappearance had died.

Los Redondos were masters of clandestinity (a massive one, as we wrote back in 2013 with Agustín Valle and Ignacio Gago), hidden and lying in wait (“she's asleep, or pretending to sleep”), but also cultivators of intimacy, which is always a not-appearing, or a limiting of the gazes. A politics of exposure.

Disappearing as the exercise of losing one's form, of becoming a little untraceable, a little unforeseen, for others and for oneself.

Even the Indio was, until the very end, someone who rationed out his presence, a strategist of transmission (rather than of mere “communication”). In that appearing and disappearing, which carried on to the end by way of holograms (one last way of being there and not being there, simultaneously), lies a good part of his incredible hold on us.

His art was also that of knowing how to give himself, and the rest of us, an ending, one I like to call elegant. He gave us plenty of advance notice that he had to go. He trained the others, us, in the scene of his absence. That gesture was sculpted over decades of practicing disappearance, a back-and-forth that not only withdraws us from others but also lets us explore what can't be explored in appearing. Disappearing as the exercise of losing one's form, of becoming a little untraceable, a little unforeseen, for others and for oneself. In the end, one of the conditions of breathing is running out of air for an instant.