In the years 1987-92, he studied at the Department of Graphics and Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts In Gdańsk. He graduated from professor's Jerzy Krechowicz's workshop in 2004. He constituted and served as the leader of artistic groups such as the Onion Center Club (1999-2001) and A Taste of Honey (2004-2005), which created experimental music, cacophonous jazz, and also experimental and music films.
In 2008, he realized Small Spaces – a quasi-documentary film on the topic of music improvisation – for which he received the GOLD REMI prize at the 32. Houston International Film Festival (2009).
In December 2011, a sign with the name of the city Sopot was saved during the renovation of the train station thanks to Flamingo's efforts. A year later, based on this historic object, the artist created one of his most important works. It reverberated in the media and in the art world. Two Men and the Sopot Sign (2011-2012) alluded to Roman Polański's famous Two Men and a Wardrobe film étude and the work by the same title by Jacek Adamas and Paweł Althamer (2008). Initially, Flamingo's project was supposed to become a film, but ultimately it was exhibited as a non-existent film arranged from four elements – the Sopot sign, a wardrobe on the city beach, an eddy at the Gdańsk bay and the title of the work. All the parts constituting the project's integrity were intended to spark the viewer's imagination, whereas the film as such was supposed to come into existence thanks to the spectator's fantasy. For this work, which was first exhibited at the Gdańsk Art Biennale (2012), Flamingo received the Grand Prix in the form of a solo exhibition in Gdańsk City Gallery in 2014.
Elvin Flamingo is the author of The Symbiosity of Creation – probably his most important project which is still continued. It was commenced in 2012 and is planned to last until 2034. The work's point of departure is cultivation of exotic ants. It consists of four parts invoking the themes of destruction and creation from scratch. The respective elements of the work are Reconstruction of Non-Human Culture, Kingdom of the Shared Quotidian, After Humans, the Biocorporation and Subterranean Struggle. On the one hand, it is based on Bruno Latour's philosophy, who proves that the nature-culture division does not exist and is a creation of theoreticians, and on the other hand Flamingo's deep interest in biology and an array of other inspirations, such as Thomas Bernhard's novel Extinction and a film depicting one of the world's biggest anthills suffused with concrete (created to study the habits of ant colonies and the methods of eradicating them).
The insects live and build their colonies in habitats designed by the author. They live, work and die in glass-equipped incubators supplied with systems of flasks, pipes and corridors, forming spaces systematically managed by its activity. According to the artist, the cultivation and the stretched-over-time project reveal the unhuman culture in a twofold manner. 'Created by non-humans and inhuman', it reveals the dark side of human activity. Flamingo explains:
Man puts himself on a pedestal and gives himself the right to flood, erase and destroy.
Life and labour of the ants is registered in the form of films, audio recordings and internet live streams. The sounds emitted by the insects – normally inuadible for humans – are amplified by Elvin Flamingo multiple times with the use of sensitive pickups. They are often used during the artist's live concerts, for example in the Wrocław National Forum of Music in 2016. The audiovisual project Simultaneous Hybrid of Musical Improvisation and Bioart {SHMIB} expands the idea of symbiosis. The music, created together with Irek Wojtczak and the band Jaaa!, is based on sounds emitted by ants, amplified a hundred times, delivered by their organum stridentium – the equivalent of the human speech apparatus. The Infer duo is responsible for the generative visual elements in the SHMIB project.