Elya Aboutboul

Elya is a first-generation immigrant student majoring in Art and Comparative Literature, and she is fascinated by the stories a landscape tells of its environment. By partaking in material play, Elya digests odd, unexplored, or uncomfortable ambivalent spaces that shape her, such as her relationship with the freeway, which runs right by the house she has lived in for the past 11 years. Last spring, Elya participated in the Undergraduate Research Fellows Program, where she created L.A. Freeway Compositions Including (Studies of Concealment), Cement Companions: AKA Infected Souls, Instruspeaker TBD, and Its Leftovers, a sonic-sculptural installation that engaged with the visual and acoustic landscape of the Los Angeles freeway. Inspired by this work, her current research analyzes the sonic landscape of architectural walls as they shape sculptural drawings. By exploring the walls of her house through their translation into sonic material, Elya metaphorically interacts with abstract notions of the solid and porous borders that shape her identity. She believes that by honing in on and collaborating with the information embedded within the buildings and objects she shares space with, she can translate her relationship to landscapes— transforming this process of exchange into affective art objects— and find answers to questions like, “what are the walls saying that I refuse to hear?”