Restoring an old clock or overhauling a music automaton are skills threatened with disappearance, which the new Arc Horloger association wants to preserve and pass on. It was created at the beginning of December to sustain their registration by UNESCO, in 2020, as an intangible heritage of humanity.
L’Arc Horloger association wants to bring together artisans, factories, training centers and other museums on both sides of the Franco-Swiss border in the long term. The committee also includes the public authorities, with the cantons of Bern, Jura, Neuchâtel and Vaud grouped together in arcjurassien.chbut also the Doubs Horloger Regional Natural Park and Grand Besançon Métropole.
The association intends to support all those involved in artistic mechanics and watchmaking mechanics in the safeguarding and transmission of practices which are, for some, threatened with disappearance.
“We also have a form of biodiversity in know-how”
“We talk about biodiversity for nature, but we also have a form of biodiversity in know-how, in professions,” illustrated Monday in La Matinale de la RTS the president of the association and watchmaker Richard Vaucher. “These are our roots. If we want the tree to be beautiful, its roots must be healthy.”
>> Read also: A national center of watchmaking know-how will open in Le Locle in 2028
In his eyes, this know-how is disappearing in particular because the environment is no longer favorable, it is economically difficult to keep them going and the demand is particularly low, all factors which do not help to create vocations. natural.
Switzerland at the forefront
Proof of this know-how? It was Switzerland and some of its craftsmen who took on the task of restoring a clock dating from 300 years ago, damaged during the attempted coup in Brazil in January 2023.
>> Read about it: Switzerland to help restore clock damaged during attempted coup in Brazil
The restoration, at the beginning of the 2000s in Porrentruy, of a moving sphere clock from the museum of the private collections of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg in Russia also took place in Switzerland, a work which involved the schools of watchmaking in Porrentruy and Morteau (F).
>> Read also: “There will be a shortage of labor in the watchmaking industry to perpetuate our professions”
Radio subject: Gaël Klein
Adaptation web: Vincent Cherpillod
Swiss
