A photo exhibition held jointly at the MIH and the Museum of Time is setting the ball rolling, with the best yet to come. The Arc Horloger project has set itself three objectives: create a Franco-Swiss coordination structure develop information and communication resources, and implement the first safeguard measures among those set out in the UNESCO application.
The project’s other partners are the International Horology Museum (MIH) in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the Swiss Federal Office for Culture, the City of Besançon and its Museum of Time, and a group of towns in France’s “watchmaking country”, along the border with Switzerland, between Morteau and Maîche. One of the major projects is the Interreg Arc Horloger, which is steered on the Swiss side by the Regional Development Hub for the cantons of Berne, Jura, Neuchâtel and Vaud, and, in France, by the Greater Besançon Area. Six months after UNESCO’s decision, other institutions are hard at work. It’s essential that the country’s watchmaking schools provide training in order to keep these skills alive.” Schools are not the only ones to have responded to the news. First to go would be pivoting, a traditional technique in watchmaking that we teach and will continue to do so. If we were to listen to industry, it wouldn’t be long before schools started dropping certain subjects from their curriculum. “It’s a fabulous decision but also a fundamental one as far as we are concerned.
“This explains why the inscription by UNESCO was so important,” notes the school’s principal, Pierre Amstutz. The Geneva Watchmaking School is one of those institutions, teaching students skills that extend from using a hand-operated lathe to programming a CNC machine. Those highly skilled techniques combine tradition and innovation.” This border region between France and Switzerland is home to a wide range of craftsmen, businesses, training institutions, museums and associations that promote and transmit these techniques that require the human hand. The application that was submitted to UNESCO describes this expertise as being “at the crossroads between science, art and technology, bring together individual and collective, as well as theoretical and practical knowledge in the fields of mechanics and micromechanics. The country’s third largest export sector after pharmaceuticals and machinery, watchmaking underpins an entire region’s economy and shapes its culture. The watchmaking sector directly employs 50,000 people in Switzerland and a further 10,000 from France, along the arc formed by the Jura mountains where the industry is concentrated. If, by chance, this victory had prompted the same reaction as the Swiss squad’s nail-biting penalty shootout, it would have been one heck of a party.
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