Like much of Canell’s practice, her body of work "Brief Syllables" stresses a materiality that, ever
so paradoxically, tethers the intangible. Composed of cross-sections of distinct telecommunication and electricity
cables (with various types, lengths and diameters), the work is explicitly object-driven in its exploration and production of space, but it is also as such, implicitly poetic. Unearthed and condensed, Canell’s cable cuts are at once “held”
and “withheld” (contained), positioned and poised: their inside, laid bare. Stripped of their functionality as energy
conductors and carriers of eliding flows of information, as overworked subterranean/undersea agents of today’s saturated networks and avenues of communication – their vital activity is made apparent and material, described further
as inducing, conducting, inter-connecting, transferring, perhaps even translating.
What Canell’s cable pieces do not cease to transmit, however, is their insistence on our being-in-the-world,
attuning us to a close observation of the things that surround us (and connect us) in an encounter with the body
and other bodies.
What is more, these works open up to new fields and processes of perception, to a multiplicity of
spaces, whether as interior (in a processual/mutual passing from inside to outside), interstitial or dis-enclosing perí-
(‘around’) space.