The Back Door to Paradise: Gambolling with the Contingencies of Promiscuous Grime

In 1810 Kleist wrote ‘And Paradise is locked and bolted, with the cherub behind us; we must journey around the world and determine if perhaps at the end somewhere there is an opening to be discovered again’. In this presentation I pick the lock to the backdoor, to the place that Kleist calls Paradise. The question which underlies my proposition, whether an exploration of the backdoor – and the ‘en abyme’ within it as distinct artistic phenomenon has anything to offer us when we think about the concept of the Dark Eden. This idea about gaining access to a shadow zone, a spectral zone, a closed system through a ‘backdoor’ is a meta-narrative function of mise en abyme which interests me when considering its uses, a reflection of what is outside the realm, which helps to contextualise and explain what is within it. In the case it nominates a realm which lies under the shadow of, but is still, for the moment, outside of codification. Opened to the possibility of the backdoor entrance which I am speculating is ‘the antipode of the antipodes’ (Flanagan 2002), Kleist informs us to find a method that bypasses normal authentication. To take a journey, find the hidden back door with fellow travelers, elsewhere and leave behind the cherubim, and instead embrace the escutcheoned, the imperiled, the undaunted, the gamblers, and inspired chancers. Revealed concealed processes I am opening us to an archaeology of leaky promiscuous earth simulations and geo-logic filtering, endorsing nascent understandings dark symbolic mirrors.