Panamarenko
(c)Deweer Gallery, Otegem
Monocedo, 2000
The Monocedo is a helicopter with two floats, so making it able to take-off and land on both land and water. Because the floats look like string beans (they are curved and of irregular shape), the device was also once called Snijboon (string bean in Dutch).
'The floats are made from bags. The material was a kind of rubberized cloth that I bought in a camping store, De Kampeerder, on Leopoldstraat in Antwerp. That was the only right sort of material they had there. The right color and the right structure. It was naturally beige in color, not painted or anything. I just glued those bags together, and that went quite well. Then they were filled-up with polyurethane foam.' - Panamarenko
Between the two pontoon floats, there is a wooden pilot's seat attached to a metal axis. The helicopter has a single asymmetric rotor blade. This blue wing, mounted behind the pilot on an upright bar, is set in motion via a small propeller that is itself driven by a powerful two-cylinder engine. The engine and the small propeller are positioned on the other end of the rotor blade, and thus function as counterweight.
'That mechanism has no gears, but rather operated via direct drive to the wing itself. With that single blade and a counterweight on the other side, it flies very well owing to centrifugal force. That single blade rotates fast enough.' - Panamarenko
The apparatus took its name from that of a medicine, Monocedocard, a vasodilator used in the treatment of cardiovascular disease.
'Monocedo alone sufficed as a name, otherwise it sounded too much like 'car', so I dropped it. Furthermore, the 'Mono' refers to that single wing... ' - Panamarenko
(source: Hans Willemse and Paul Morrens, in: 'Copyright Panamarenko', 2005)