ABSTRACT
When I was a child, the factory where my father worked organized an excursion for the employees and their families. I was promised we would go on a trip out of the city, into nature and the countryside. On arrival-and much to my surprise-I found that, instead of the beauties of nature, it was in fact a big dam and reservoir construction that we were taken to see. We spent the whole day by the dam, marvelling at the power of technology and the ability of humankind to control the flow of nature's water. These trips to the dams were very popular in the 1970s. They were pilgrimages to the revered shrines of technology that displayed humankind's power to transform nature through progress and technology. By visiting the modern shrines en masse, people became witnesses to the successful outcome of modernity's Promethean project to tame nature. The remarkable domination of nature and of the landscape to which these technological shrines testified remained inscribed in my memory. In their strange, assertive kind of beauty, they did not seem to belong to either nature or the city. To me, there seemed to be no connection between these proud deities and my everyday life, my home, my city; no connection
between the tamed still waters resting at the foot of the dam and water swirling wild at my command through the hose in our back yard. The dam was an elaborate human construction, out there in the wilderness, commanding water to stop flowing, while the flow of water in my home was a natural and simple thing: I simply had to turn a tap or press a switch to satisfy my needs. Similarly, the lights of my city-which gave me a sense of the familiar and homely as soon as I saw them flickering on our way back from the long dam trips-were part of the glamour of the city, and of the coziness of my home, and had nothing to do with nature, which remained dark, silent, and wild.
