The environmental engineer who collects water from the world and displays it in an exhibition

Carlos Montani (57), engineer and ecologist, is a global water collector. In his workshop, he keeps bottles labeled with the information of the person who gave him the sample, the date and where it comes from. He keeps them in the dark in drawers and trunks in his studio, as part of a traveling exhibition, which will soon see the light again, on March 22, World Water Day until April 20 at the Casa of Culture (Avenida de Mayo 575) . Her name is water planet and its purpose is install the importance of caring for this finite and irreplaceable resource.

The former carpentry and forge workshop that houses this water collection is a temple for Montani. His legacy. Your past and your present. There, as a child, he learned to master the tools of his grandfather, who was a cabinetmaker, and his father, who made more utilitarian pieces. “With my friends, we took sticks and nails and made swords. I also repaired their bicycles. I made ball carts to run in the street”, he says on this stage of life, in a place that is its history. “When ‘I go in there, I isolate myself from the world. My life goes through this workshop. At the time, I bought everything inside from my grandfather,” he says.

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The water collector was born in Capital. He grew up in the neighborhood of Mount Castro. And he never left the region, except during the years he lived in Costa Rica, when he worked in a company that placed great importance on the protection of the environment.

Regarding the reason for this interest in water, he believes that it is linked to an experience from his childhood. “We build ourselves through our experiences and we cannot get rid of our past”, he expresses. This is how he remembers that at the age of five, he visited the field that his father had bought in the Chaco. Sometimes he took it with him and he remembers it faithfully. “One of the things he did was put some water mills and an Australian tank. I played a lot with the manager’s son, “Huguito”, who was my age. I remember his face as if it were today when the water from the mill started to come out, a super crystal clear stream in a very arid area, with good soil, but very arid. For me, it was not so shocking because I had water at home, but I remember Huguito, putting his hand under the jet of water, fresh, clean and in large quantities.. A jet flower came out every time the mill turned,” he recalls.

Carlos, who had studied with an industrialist, chose to become a mechanical engineer. During his years in Costa Rica, in a company that manufactures PVC pipes for the conduct of water, he began to have contacts not only with this subject. He had started taking painting lessons and doing stained glass. When he stopped working in this company and returned to Argentina, with his own consulting firm, he felt that he did not have the social base he had in this company. And it started with a search. “It’s there that I decided to do artistic activities that had to do with social. The first one I did was with the Patricia Sosa Foundation, which coincidentally had to do with water. she did a lot water well in the Chaco region. So we campaigned love printswho had to get the fingerprints of personalities, the painted hands stamped on a t-shirt and on a canvas and who was auctioned off for food for the Qom”, he says.

After this campaign in which he helped collect 14 tons of food, he continued with another job, called water footprint. “A subject that mobilized me because sometimes we leave the tap open while brushing our teeth, which is wasteful, but there are things that consume a lot of water and we don’t realize it”, he says. And it starts to show the waste: a sheet of A4 paper is equivalent to 10 liters of water. A kilo of meat, about 13,000 liters. The sample was presented in schools, to show the extent, the magnitude of the waste. “I try to convey. how to say that 2 kilos of meat equals a truck like fuel trucks but full of watersince they transport 30,000 litres”, he illustrates.

Montani wanted to show that the problem was bigger than we think. “I did a job that I loved, that Aysa bought me, called water footprint, which was 8 meters by two and a half meters, with a light below and a blue frost above, which when walking on the short frost and in some parts of the work there were phrases about consumption. And once you removed your foot it gave you a few seconds to read it and then the gel coated it again and you had to keep looking for another print. Afterwards people had to walk on the job to be able to find meaning,” he says.

water planet came after water footprint. Montani had it in mind. It was an idea I had for a while, “to make a collection of the waters of the world, like stop in time, to leave a sample of each moment, with its history with the person, with the place, with the date it involved every little bottle,” says the engineer who started collecting water 11 years ago.

The first water samples reached him in March 2012, at the factory where he had worked at Pablo Podestá. There, employees left a water sample, and then presentations began at water protection institutions and schools, where participants brought more water. Some boys had water brought from Uruguay, others offered to get it from other distant places with the help from relatives that they were traveling. So the work grew and adapted.

It has water from all over Argentina, also from America and Europe. One of the farthest he has is from Japan. Each bottle contains a story that Carlos evokes each time he sets up and takes down the exhibition. “I work with a person from a company in the United States who is Japanese. When he went to visit the family, his son Yugo drew water for me from his grandfather’s house. Later, when I traveled to the United States, I brought it with me and we added it to the work,” he says. Another unique bottle is that of antarctic water. “A soldier who campaigned there brought it to me, I met him during one of the activities we had done in a school and he told me that he was going to bring me some Antarctic water. Then he brought me melt water from the Hope Foundation”. The message that spreads with work water planet whose bottles are exposed on a panel with a light effect of a wave, is that it is taken awareness of the importance of water for life. What he asks is that the waters of the collection be drinking water, but there are some exceptions, such as that of the Jordan, another of Amsterdam and that of Antarctica.

The work is ready to travel and in the meantime spends most of its time stored in the studio. The structure is inside five large chests and the bottles in 20 drawers, with dividers so that they do not collide, insulated with polystyrene foam, so that there are not many temperature variation and also is kept in the dark, to avoid any possible proliferation of algae. Likewise, he added to each bottle a chlorine product, which the UBA gave him, for its conservation.

The oldest bottle he owns dates back to 2007, before his job, from a trip he made to Colombia. Another coincidence. Something he had forgotten. He had gone with a friend to the famous Andrés beef restaurant and as a souvenir they had received a bottle of water with his label. “I don’t know if I took mine or threw it away and my friend kept it. When I started all this, when he moved out, he found it in the back of the closet and brought it to me. It has the date we went there, it is impeccable, ”he underlines.

Each bottle, in addition to containing water, recalls a moment. One of them has been saving water since the day his mother, María Ferrari, died. It also has the birthday of a friend’s children. “If people took the work and the time and the trouble to collect the water and send it to me, it’s because they value the water and I think that’s the main thing that I continue with work.”.

The work of the ecologist passed by the Vatican during a day dedicated to water. Montani offered to drive it and they accepted. “Obviously I took the opportunity to try to get some water from Pope Francis and what I did was go and get water from a fountain that is in front of Santa Marta, where he lives in. On the Wednesday when he celebrated Mass in the square, through the Argentine Embassy, ​​I had managed to be in the neighboring box where the Pope passes and I offered him a play which summed up water planet with a small bottle of water from each continent and I said to him: “this morning, I drank water from the fountain of Santa Marta that I would like to be able to include in the work in your name? And he said, ‘yes, I’m fine’. So from that day on, the Pope’s water is part of the work,” he concludes. water planet it already has about 1900 bottles of water and continues to grow.

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