The Third Door

In 2011, French publishing house Pomme Perdu will launch a series of releases it is calling Minuit sur le Mur, or, Midnight on the Wall. Each release—we are anticipating a total of 12—will feature a contemporary labyrinthologist discussing a specific architectural or structural feature of labyrinths. These unique discussions, which will assume the form of a collection of short essays, will be accompanied by photography by some of the leading photo-navigators in the field. Argentinian photo-navigator Espinoza Gorjado, whose "Study in Defamiliarization" recently graced the walls of many a contemporary museum, is just one of the contributors whose work (much of which is new) I cannot wait to behold.

Alex and I were privileged to receive this week an advanced copy of the first in the series: La Troisième Porte, or, The Third Door, by one of the founding fathers of Neo-Recursivism, Jacques Oligreff.

For our readers who are less familiar with this structure, a third door is "a common labyrinth structure, though not ubiquitous, characterized by a phenomenon of light in the labyrinth atmosphere that creates the illusion of a boundary or obstruction, but is in fact permissive; the only exit to some Second Centers." (CLP, Labyrinths in Theory and Practice: An Introduction, Boston: Essex UP, 2000.)

With the permission of Pomme Perdu, we are proud post a sneak peek of Oligreff's essay with a photograph of an exemplary third door in Amant Fernald's White Slate Indoor Labyrinth outside Ontario:

The third door beckons us— like ghosts we must believe in, for the burden of disbelief is too much.