Eso Malflor: Bodies in Mutation, Landscapes of Transitional Matter
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Editorial and research: Area Temporal Editorial TeamArchive: Artistic Mapping Open Call 2026
The work of Eso Malflor is constructed from a territory where categories cease to be stable. Their pieces do not represent only bodies, landscapes, or organic forms: they articulate states of continuous transformation, zones where the biological, the mineral, and the affective contaminate one another. Through drawing, sculpture, photography, and installation, Malflor develops a practice that understands existence as a transitory and relational process, where all matter is always traversed by something else.
Within this visual universe, the notion of the “trans” does not appear reduced to a fixed identity, but expanded toward a structural condition of the world. The trans emerges as movement, mutation, adaptation, and survival. The images seem to register organisms in formation, residues of future ecosystems, or bodies that have not yet finished defining themselves. This ambiguity is central: the works inhabit a threshold between growth and deterioration, between appearance and disappearance.
The black sculptures composed of bones and spines condense much of this conceptual operation. They do not function as archaeological remains nor as symbols of death, but as hybrid assemblages where osseous matter reorganizes itself into new vital architectures. There is within them a parasitic and floral quality at the same time: they proliferate, expand, and produce a tension between violence and fertility. The body ceases to be a closed entity and becomes a vulnerable, mutable ecosystem contaminated by its environment.
This same logic traverses the drawings of vegetal and insectoid creatures. The forms twist, graft themselves, and develop impossible anatomies where roots, skins, extremities, and foliage coexist without hierarchy. Malflor does not imagine fantastic beings from traditional speculative fiction, but from a profound observation of the organic mechanisms of adaptation. Their creatures seem to emerge from a post-collapse ecology, where survival depends on the capacity to transform constantly.
The paintings and textile surfaces introduce another register within this investigation. The luminous grids, translucent layers, and repetitive patterns evoke systems of containment, cellular maps, or digital structures in decomposition. There, the image appears suspended between the technological and the organic, as if the memory of the landscape had become trapped within a deteriorated interface. Even in the most abstract pieces, a sensation of internal respiration persists, of living matter attempting to reorganize itself.
In the monochromatic works of almost spectral appearance, gesture becomes atmospheric. The landscapes dissolve like memories eroded by time or by a latent environmental crisis. Vegetal and geological forms emerge barely visible, like traces of a territory resisting disappearance. The fragility of these images does not imply passivity; on the contrary, it activates a slow perception, where the work demands to be traversed like a sensitive organism.
One of the most singular aspects of Malflor’s practice is their capacity to connect autobiography and ecology without separating body and territory. Bodily transition, migration, memory, and environmental wear appear intertwined as equivalent processes. Each material used —bone, ink, fabric, pigment, stone, found objects— operates as a physical index of those transformations. The material choice is never illustrative: it constitutes the conceptual core of the work.
Taken together, their production proposes a vision where identity and nature cease to be understood as stable structures. The human appears decentralized, absorbed within broader networks of material coexistence. Instead of representing defined bodies, Malflor works through states of transition: incomplete organisms, mutant landscapes, and forms that exist precisely because they are still changing. In this insistence on the unfinished, their work does not propose transformation as an exception, but as the fundamental condition of all existence. Each piece seems to remind us that to live implies mutating: eroding, contaminating, adapting, and re-emerging under another possible form.
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