THE PLUMBER
30 minutes (2002)
The central theme of this work is telling stories, and that there are many ways to do so. Using the anecdotes that the characters tell each other, the video runs through diverse narrative codes, dissolving the borders between them. The Plumber escapes from an anecdote told by one of the main characters, becoming a loose tale that runs around the city of Panama, leading us from one story to the next. The video depicts Panama City as an incoherent, disorderly place, seeking to establish an analogy between the unpredictable, winding fluidity of the anecdotes and the city’s arbitrary and amorphous structure. As in many other stories, a few fetish objects function as the fuel that moves the plot along. The objects contain stories, and the stories contain objects. The Plumber places as much emphasis on the objects as it does on the way they circulate and connect one story with all the others.