Today I donated a dry qanat to the Museum of Water. This is a collection of publicly donated water – with accompanying stories. The Museum is meant to provoke thought about our relationship to water: how we cherish it – but usually take it for granted. All the donated stories and containers of water tell of how personally important water is. Despite this, we are often profligate with water, and thoughtless about it.
My donation was accession number 495 in the collection. Lots of people have donated water from rivers they love, or tears, or sweat, or spit, or snowballs, or… all the other sorts of water you can imagine.
I wanted to donate an absence – the lack of water in all the qanats in Iran which are now dry because of the use of mechanical pumps. Qanats are one of the world’s oldest technologies. They were ‘Made in Iran’ thousands of years ago, and spread across many other countries. Something else that started in Iran and spread – Middle East oil – has been used to destroy qanats – with thousands of diesel pumps draining irreplaceable groundwater.