No compensation is possible (working diagram)

Nolan Oswald Dennis
No compensation is possible (working diagram), 2018
Wallpaper, archival notes, hand drawn notes, found objects and pencil drawings
Variable Dimensions

In this work No Compensation is Possible, the word compensation is diagrammed as a non-linear account of the terrible historical negotiation between antagonistic readings of the meaning and significance of the notion (and dream) of western compensation. Readings that oscillate between notions of repair and punishment, healing and trauma, payment and silence, memorialisation and forgetting, forgiveness and guilt.  These ideas are parsed through a network of complimentary systems, such as dreams; dignity; memory; ecology; embodied trauma; representation and the metaphysics of healing.  The diagram is shown as a mind map wallpaper in the tradition of the map room, where the wall map functions as a critical backdrop for a certain kind of world-thinking. Here the diagram wallpaper inscribes a mindmap room, where a certain kind of world-thinking is possible which operates in the in-between of these difficult questions.  Extending the idea of the map room, the wallpaper is fitted with a series of shelves each carrying a different indexical object of world-thinking (eg, books, maps, rocks, etc); pinned onto of the wallpaper is a series of drawings and notes engaging the symbolic structure of compensation, and finally an industrial step ladder sits in the space in front of the wall, a gesture of access, labour, and construction.