Meganeudon II

Obsessed with flight and flying engines of all sorts, Panamarenko formed his pseudonym by associating the abbreviation for Pan American Airlines, “Pan Am”, and the name of a Soviet politician, Panteleimon Ponomarenko. In the 1970s, the artist started developing his practice around natural sciences and innovation, with a particular interest in space and aviation. Panamarenko designed motorised units and flying engines such as spaceships, zeppelins, aeroplanes and mechanised wings from model studies inspired by the natural sciences and already-existing technologies. Materialising the encounter between kinetics and imagination, his works embody motion, acceleration, rotation, duration, and balance.

"Meganeudon II" is a motorised mechanism that imitates an insect’s morphology and flight. Since the early 1970s, Panamarenko has realised experiments around the flapping motion of insect wings in order to make use of this particular mechanism for human-powered, pedal-driven light aircraft. With varying complexities, his studies were carried out in series and referred to as "Chisto", "Umbilly" and "Meganeudon". For this work, Panamarenko morphed the name "Meganeudon" from Meganeura, a giant dragonfly species, in order to make it sound prehistorical. The two wings, which look like a membrane, are connected by means of a spring, thus keeping each other in balance. The air that is caught in the wings when they open is subsequently pushed back by the spring-loaded recoil of the wing, which is a highly efficient way of flying.