Disappear Until It Clears: Nature, Ambient and Silence

I

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

I read my super-short breathing as a message: "time to switch to a different speed regime." For that I need to climb out of the outer hole: go somewhere with little human presence, where entities 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 mean talking, and paying attention doesn't mean listening. Being silenced can be an act of repression, but wanting to keep quiet can be an act of care, even of self-defense. I've already picked the place: the zone that links the Patagonian plateau to the Andes, around Corcovado, Chubut.

II

February 6, 2026. We arrive in Corcovado. I spend two days sighing. As if I were deflating. Deep, tectonic sighs. With every sigh I get a broader sense of my body. The short breathing was nasal; these exhalations come from the lungs. I breathe in 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 some unexplored erogenous zone might be.

We arrive in Corcovado. I spend two days sighing. As if I were deflating. Deep, tectonic sighs. With every sigh I get a broader sense of my body.

I look at the river and sigh. I walk down a trail and sigh. I make myself a mate to look at the mountain and sigh. All day long. 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's simple, on the surface, but socially difficult, almost a privilege: disappearing for a while. Suspending habits of movement, trading 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 about them the way I think about them during the year. Not looking at my phone too much. Writing at a different speed. Wading across a river for two hours, meltwater up to my waist, trying not to break my ankles. Learning to cook a salmon. Identifying edible mushrooms. Writing about things I don't usually write about. Staring at 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 don't feel the need to deal with unfinished business. I think about the future and about what's still to be done, but they don't show up as commitments, threats or promises demanding immediate fulfillment. They show up as a playing field: I toy with ideas, projects, what I'd like to do in the coming years. I speculate or, as I like to say paraphrasing Stanislaw Lem, I "weigh possibilities." I follow 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 stretch the physiological metaphors: I'm inducing oxygenation.

But I also think sideways, and in the middle of what surrounds me. I make myself do that exercise. Textures, smells, sounds. I touch the trees. I follow the flight of birds. I watch Patagonian maras leap out of nowhere and take off like a shot. I hear the undergrowth crunch under my steps. I hear Paz humming as she walks ahead of me. I let my surroundings advance on me. As novelty, as affect, as a sign of how immense the planet is and proof of the millions of things I have no clue 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-appear. To dis-appear you have to have appeared. Before appearing, things aren't disappeared. Disappearing 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 involves a violence of extraction (which makes me think about 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, just 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 realized that when I want to disappear, I look for vast places. The southern sea, the desert, the Puna, Patagonia. They're never cities (I go to those when I want to speed up): they're always geological giants, sparsely populated. My disappearing is very mindful of human eyes; it tries to stop appearing before them. But that doesn't reduce the mountain or the sea to backdrops or mere witnesses.

My disappearing is regional and finite. It doesn't destroy appearing as such, just 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 drawn to approaching and meddling with giants that move at non-human speeds, sometimes super slow, sometimes super fast? Enormous witnesses put me on a scale that lightens me, even at critical moments. A few years ago I went to the Argentine Andean region to make some important decisions. To do it, I headed deep into the mountains. I walked all day and slept in refuges. When I came down, I caught 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 low-human environment so introspection can unfold. Because my introspection isn't just about going inward, it's about being in another outside.

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

V

I'm euphoric on a level that has nothing to do with eloquence. It's a bodily, expressive euphoria. I can walk for hours without stopping, or stay still for just as long. This disappearing doesn't mean agitation or staying still, but moving in another key, tuned to other notes. The meaning of fatigue changes, my notion of discomfort changes. Otherwise there's no explaining how 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 climb a rise whose summit looks like a maze of caves where, I was warned, there might be pumas; or spend a really long time staring at a bend in the river.

In that lateral movement (I mean: a movement more attentive to what's happening right in front of me) I discover myself as a tissue that keeps stretching. I don't suffer the tearing, quite the opposite. It empowers me. It binds me more to my surroundings than to my own actions. Being in the improper: 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 such a big deal.

VI

I no longer know what day it is and I don't need to know. 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. Just that you can't go without their permission because you have to pass through some gates. Unbelievable. Some son of a bitch bought himself a mountain. He doesn't live there, he probably never goes. Maybe it has some exploitable mineral. Any argument sounds like bullshit to me. The history of capitalism is one of the most absurd that has ever existed. Capitalism is as unjust as it is absurd. I think about those owners and they make me feel 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 areas 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 on that force pushing me to think sideways, to dissolve, to blur. It's a wall that rejects that movement. Capitalism is a huge operation for limiting the possibilities of appearing but also, and I feel like I get 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 to say from managing perimeters to managing trajectories, in order to intensify movement, what keeps pulsing at its core 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 lines up with the most ambient musical moment of my life. A moment that started right before the pandemic and still hasn't closed. 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 of tempering worries, making peace with suspension; making room to face what had to be faced.

Lately I've been listening a lot to Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Iu Takahashi, Eric Olsen, Lumtz, Loscil, Laraaji, Federico Durand, neosika, Slow Attack Ensemble and giants 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 check 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 signatures: Japanese ambient differs from Swedish ambient; ambient from the Argentine Andean region has tones you won't find in the British stuff. Look at it this way: the Corcovado River has a unique murmur, like the Amazon, like the Danube. Since it's in dialogue with sound art and field recordings, ambient is a genre that lives up to its name; it is, precisely, environmental. It listens to its surroundings, it tries to re-produce them or to produce from them.

As I said: if during the pandemic I wrote an essay where I said I experienced ambient as a sanitary barrier, lately I hear it as exit music. An exit from what? An exit to where? Foucault talked about heterotopias to name those other-places that are here, among us. Places that aren't utopias, but escapes into different lives. A sideways kind of thinking. Lives that can last minutes. More than a soundtrack, ambient is a channel of passage into my recent heterotopias.

Ambient resembles a mountain because it's a passage to a place where what you seek, or find, is a sense of the impersonal. A disappearance, a decentering, a tearing. Hence the cosmic, the animal, the insect, the mineral, the organic, the machinic in ambient. It sits above and below the individual. Like a viscus, like a power line, like a tardigrade. Hence, too, the scarcity of voices and singing in the works. Ambient is music that lends itself well to disappearing, to pushing toward minimal intervention. From a point of view that anchors its values in will, centrality, being the protagonist (in other words, in heroism), this may sound terrifying, but if you value pre-disposition, relaxation, receptiveness, there's something here rather than nothing.

VIII

In the terms of this essay, disappearing means carrying out a change of environment and agency. It's an exercise in induction. More like dropping acid than 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 may never have been activated, opening up the space of the possible, opening up 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 resources shrinks; some resources are no longer available, they're off-limits. Self-imposed bans. But a scarce medium also breeds invention, because it opens up the possibility of seeing possibilities where none were detected before. Like in ambient music, where it's often minor variations, or repetitive sounds, that build up a monotonous but rich landscape.

The desire to disappear seems to resonate with that feature of ambient: withdrawing not to become poorer, but to become richer through subtraction. Somewhat like what François Jullien says about ancient Chinese music: in it, silence is conceived as all possible sounds.

IX

Lately I've been coming across literary, artistic and cinematic works that expose what I'd call a will to disappear. Works that, I believe, speak of a present-day desire to lose forms, habits, relationships, horizons, in order to gain something: ways of perceiving time, of planning, calculating, exchanging, existing.

Escape has always been a form of promise. A paradise in negative, a paradise we know nothing about, except that it won't be this place. “Shutting it all down, I'm getting the hell out,” the signs said in 2001. “Shutting the hell down, I'm getting out of it all,” they might say today. As the protagonist of Toda la verdad, by Juan José Becerra, might have said: one day he leaves the office and starts walking, and walks, and walks. Until the city falls 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, 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 might even be called peace. An elemental, atheist conversion that leads him to impersonality.

The desire to disappear cuts across classes. The privilege lies in the possible times and places for disappearing. That's why the impossibility of disappearing also has class features. And it's 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 to give another meaning to that malaise; that's also where despair, dismay and helplessness grow.

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

When we're in a situation where we feel trapped, a suffocation takes root. Not being able to breathe, says Bifo Berardi, is the dominant sensation of our condition under a capitalism that hyper-pressurizes, pushes toward universal competition and kills the poor and the racialized by asphyxiation, while pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thinning the air and making it hard to breathe. Millions of human beings taking short, shallow breaths.

X

Trenque Lauquen, the extraordinary film directed by Laura Citarella and written by her and Laura Paredes, tells the story of a desire to flee and disappear. Its protagonist, Laura, first leaves the big city. Then she leaves her boyfriend. Soon after, she leaves the small town that gives the film its title (which, incidentally, also refers to a geological body, since Trenque Lauquen means “round lagoon” in Mapudungun). Her presence before other humans gradually recedes. Fewer and fewer people can bear witness 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 for Ezeiza airport 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 once had; nor is it going somewhere to intensify her presence before others. Nor is it dying. Instead, Laura starts to sort of dissolve into the countryside. She blends into the soil and the plants. She becomes landscape. She becomes surroundings. She becomes, precisely, ambient. As if to say: she tends toward becoming mineral.

As if one became the mountain; as if one could perceive like the mountain Cixin Liu writes about: “What was the human world in the eyes of the mountain? Perhaps just something it saw over one idle afternoon. First, some tiny living creatures appeared on the plain. After a while they multiplied, and after another while they built structures like anthills 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 tiny creatures 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 an early-twentieth-century French sociologist interested in the relationship between the capacity to invent and the capacity to repeat and imitate that defines humans. Capacities that aren't contradictory, but necessary to each other.

Published this year by Cactus, the novel Fragment of Future History, written by Tarde in 1896, isn't your usual sociology work. It's a science fiction novel in which Earth's population, unable to live on the surface due to a series of cosmic and climatic phenomena that make it uninhabitable, invents an underground world. That world is very different from ours. It's a fairer, more cooperative, more caring world. From solar to solidarity. It's the story of a people that, in order to improve, had to become invisible under catastrophic conditions, to go underground. And in that process, what was left behind was a huge chunk of the biological kingdom. In the depths there are no plants, no trees, no large animals. Humanity loses that environment, but not all is lost: its inventiveness manages to connect it in new ways with the possibilities of the mineral. Possibilities that, from a biological standpoint, seem fewer, but turn out to be many, enough, and just what's needed, to shape a society fairer than the one that existed amid the evolutionary abundance of life on the surface. Tarde leaves us with a question that resonates today, amid ecological crisis: what if justice also meant losing?

Fragment reads like a kind of degrowth thinking avant la lettre, in which inventiveness isn't suppressed (it's not a John Zerzan-style primitivism), but reconfigured and redirected under new principles. It sounds harsh, but the novel seems to say that sometimes it takes a good catastrophe to produce justice. As the tango goes: “First you have to learn to suffer, then to love, then to leave, and finally to wander without thought,” which, read in light of this article's ideas, sounds a bit like a strategy for disappearing.

Tarde leaves us with a question that resonates today, amid ecological crisis: 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 dropping here and there on the surface, while in the Vietcong's tunnels a fairer principle of existence was being built, which was also a principle of resistance. Maybe that's the big difference between a tunnel and a trench. The trench is waiting and lying in ambush. The tunnel is production. The trench is a parenthesis in appearing; the tunnel is a new relationship between disappearing and appearing.

XII

There's not much point in reducing a conjuncture to a single meaning or force (that's why I don't speak of an era), but we can say that today there is a desire to disappear. Make no mistake: 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 coming clean about disconnections that already exist. About the difficulties in making the connections we want. It's not the cause, it's the effect.

It's almost a strategy, so that there can be, or can once again be, politics, commitment, concern for others. It's a coming clean about 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, so they desert. They build a life on the edge of the war. They're antiheroes, but they're also hospitable, kind, understanding. Like the Vietnamese soldiers, they build their hideout underground. In fact, the first edition, published 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 through violence. They know they're not capable of it. They're smarter than heroes, who confuse dying with winning. The traps of transcendence. The pichiciegos aren't pacifists; they do nothing to end the war. They're peaceable, rather: they wait for it to end, they live off it and alongside it. The unsettling part is that, under that figure so unbearable to a warrior ethos, their presence paradoxically plays a part in the end of the war. Their desertion, their withdrawal, their disappearance makes a difference their presence wouldn't have made.

XIII

In the early 2000s, novels came out like Plop, by Rafael Pinedo, or the alternate history La guerra del desierto, by Pedro Mairal, which tell the story of societies that disappear. In Plop, an endless rain gradually eats away at life's possibilities, just as Tarde's solar storms ate away at them in Fragment of Future History, and life gets encapsulated in a tribal existence more cruel than senseless. In Mairal, unlike Tarde, there's no escape to another plane but a dismantling of 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 whole story. Another good example would be El traductor, by Salvador Benesdra, which narrates what might have looked like a transition but ends up being an annihilation, a form of absolute, or definitive, transition.

In all three cases, social relations gradually fall apart; and yet, despite 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 chronicle of decline that is 76-89-03, one experiences something like an insistence against a shifting background. Or in Pizza, Birra, Faso. Or in Okupas. Hell, back in 2000 even the masses went to therapy on TV, every Tuesday night, watching Vulnerables. And I remember myself reading Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things in 2002.

Today, on the other hand, I just finished Tentacle, by Rita Indiana, Vayasí, by Pereyra Estabani, The City & the City, by China Miéville, Inclúyanme afuera, by María Cristoff, and the Xenogenesis trilogy, by Octavia Butler. I realize that none of these books narrate worlds falling apart, but rather mutant individualities, a crisis of limits, an explosion of temporalities (so different from the reverse linearity of La guerra del desierto). Somewhere between the fantastic and the weird, reality that can never be fully grasped 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 ultimately 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 transforming the conditions of existence, ends up eliminating that very position (abolishing work and exploitation), then disappearing also seems to be a strategy by which a social position eliminates itself.

XIV

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

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

Disappearing as the practice of losing one's shape, of becoming a little unlocatable, a little unpredictable, to others and to oneself.

Even the Indio himself was, to the very end, someone who rationed his presence, a strategist of transmission (rather than of mere “communication”). In that appearing and disappearing, which stretched all the way to the end through holograms (one last way of being there and not being there at the same time), lies much of his incredible staying power.

His art was also that of knowing how to give, for himself and for others, an ending, one I like to call elegant. He let us know well in advance that he had to go. He kept training the others, us, for the scene of his absence. That gesture was sculpted over decades of practicing disappearance, a back-and-forth that doesn't just withdraw us from others but lets us explore what can't be explored by appearing. Disappearing as the practice of losing one's shape, of becoming a little unlocatable, a little unpredictable, to others and to oneself. After all, one of the conditions of breathing is to run out of air, for an instant.