Messianists

Our hosts tell us of their photographic project to rescue images from another Nashville. How else can they be saved from the monotonous uniformity of the urban sprawl – from identical malls and warehouses and the suburbs of vinyl houses?

They've photographed abandoned roller skating rinks, empty toilet roll holders in public toilets, resting freight carriages, tarpaulin covered cars and closed up loading bays; they've photographed sofas stranded on sidewalks, the signs on Mexican restaurants, and various views of the girders of the pedestrian bridge that leads downtown …

How moved they were by the faint painted-over letters they saw on a monumental mall fronts, and of the words 'closeing sale' graffitied across a shuttered shopfront! How moved by the rusting stairwells and broken glass in the derelict Yazoo Brewery!

And who wrote the following lines on a piece of paper stapled to a telegraph pole: 'Patience. Don't think of it as deferred gratification, but as immediately suffering'? It was partially covered over by a poster advertising free Ninja lessons, they said.

What are they looking for? Our hosts speak of kernels of time, of dialectical images and rescue operations. They speak of actualising an obsolete past, of reenchantment and reawakening, and of the temporal and hierarchical layering of the city.

Our hosts are people of history like us, W. says. Messianists.