Inventing-Mania! The Sailing Airship of the “Engineer von Tarden”

Exhibition design: raumlabor Berlin
Model construction airship: Bernd-Michael Weisheit
Room installation: Mahony Collective
Essay for the exhibition: Teresa Präauer
Graphic: Gruetzner Triebe
The exhibition begins with a medical file from the Charité archive. It unfolds the story of a patient who was admitted to the psychiatric clinic in 1909. There, he worked tirelessly on his invention of a sailing airship, which was not only intended to help him overcome the wall of psychiatry. He wanted to be remembered as the “Engineer von Tarden”.
His story takes us back to a time when zeppelin euphoria was at its peak, the first airship was flying in the skies over Berlin and psychiatry was using the term “inventing-mania” as a diagnosis that also described a collective social condition. As a still young academic discipline, it struggled with the definition of clinical pictures to define its subject: the human psyche.
The exhibition reveals the interweaving of psychiatry, the individual and society, exposing its constructions and projections. It opens up a variety of resonating spaces with a spatial installation by the Mahony Collective, a literary story by Teresa Präauer and a reconstruction of the sailing airship by Bernd-Michael Weisheit.