Melchior Dias Santos creates images that seem to come from an in-between space, where reality loses its sharpest edges and lets something more fragile surface. HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY is born right there, at that point where everything slows down and attention shatters, forcing us to find a new way of being in the world. The series is an attempt to reorder what’s left, to pause the noise so we can hear the invisible subtext of things.

The photographs follow people and places that seem to live half a step out of sync. Shadows, reflections, textures and scratches become an integral part of the narrative, almost as if they were a visual translation of that underground tension that accompanies the days when systems jam and we mentally curl up into ourselves. Figures emerge and dissolve, captured in moments that are neither fully present nor completely absent. It’s like watching someone slip to the margins of their own life, without making a sound.

In these shots we find a kind of rough delicacy, a melancholy that never really slips into nostalgia. Reflective surfaces distort the subjects, scratched glass creates barriers that don’t isolate but instead amplify a feeling of distance that seems to wash over us. Everything seems to live under pressure: the light, the bodies, the spaces, even time itself. And yet there is no drama, only an almost disarming sincerity.

What we see is a fragment of a larger project, perhaps destined never to really close. And it is precisely this uncertainty that makes it powerful: HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY doesn’t look for conclusions, it doesn’t build a linear story. It is an archive of states of mind, a collection of moments in which reality changes shape before our eyes.

“I walk the random path — intuition does the rest,” says the artist. And here intuition is everything. It is the invisible thread that holds together what would otherwise risk scattering. It is the way meaning is given to the very act of disappearing, not in order to escape, but to see more clearly.