Elio Müller — Matazz

Elio Mueller

Elio Müller’s work investigates unstable relationships between human and non-human agencies within hybrid landscapes shaped by ecological and technological entanglements. Drawing on science fiction and speculative narratives, he explores transitional states, zones of decay, transformation, and emergence, where boundaries between organism and artifact, utopia and collapse begin to blur.

In his installations, Elio Mueller works with materials that possess an inherent ambivalence: substances that appear at once toxic and alluring, growing and decaying, stable and fragile. He is interested in the fluidity of such constellations and their unsettling potential, creating open-ended arrangements that resist fixed meanings and elude unambiguous categorisation.
In Sedimenting Bodies - Traces of Continuous Transformations (2025), Mueller works with iron(II) sulphate, a substance commonly used in agriculture to inhibit moss growth. Here, crystallisation becomes a materialisation of temporality: a process in which sedimentation, growth and decay continuously merge into one another. Arranged within chemical-industrial vats, the sculptural bodies accumulate deposits, sediment and crystallise, continuously altering their appearance over the course of the exhibition.
The installation thus remains in a state of transformation and deliberately resists a final, completed form. Opening up a speculative landscape, the material itself emerges as a spectre-simultaneously remnant and arrivant-of a haunted future already unfolding in the present.