Interview with Olivier Audemars - Family History of Audemars Piguet: Art Basel Hong Kong 2017

Why did people decide to settle in such a place at the beginning? And the second question: how come this region became a center of complicated horology in the world? What we discover is that the first people who decided to settle there were extremely independent-minded. They didn't want to live under the rule of the King of France or the Duke of Savoy. So they decided to emigrate to a region that was quite hostile, in order to be able to live freely rather than stay where they would have to obey.

Way to make a living — there were, as you can see on this image, nearly no resources. The only things were dark forests and long winters. What happened actually is that they discovered that among those rocks there was something a little bit special, because they had a tiny quantity of iron ore. Using the wood from the forests to fill their furnaces, they've been able to extract this raw iron.

And then they used the second resource that they had plenty of, which was time. Because when you have snow for most of the year, then you have a lot of time. That's the reason why instead of making simple objects, they started to make mechanisms — things that had a high added value. And with all this time, they started to make very complicated mechanisms. When it came to watches, it was not simple watches with two hands. They decided to develop additional mechanisms. They took their inspiration from the motion of the Moon around the Earth, and they duplicated the calendar — time, day, week, the year — and it takes an extremely complex extra mechanism put in a volume as small as this one.

So it means that because of those own strengths — which were a tiny quantity of iron and a large quantity of time — they eventually started to develop those mechanisms. And you could say that's basically it. Because they've been able to do that, they were able to get the necessary resources to live there. So you could say that watchmaking was a way to live independently and live freely. And that's a way that is very important for us, for our company. We want to continue the tradition, which allows us to truly live in the original way.

These are people that are working in the Vallée de Joux, and that's what we have to do our best at — so that when the day comes, we'll be able to transmit it to the next generation. We try to ensure — you think about the decisions that I'm about to take — in 50 years, we always try to build this bridge between the past and the future. It takes between six to nine months for one watchmaker to make such a watch. So if you take also into account the fact that it takes many years to reach the level of skill which is necessary to start making such watches, it means that a watchmaker will maybe be able to make perhaps 20 or 25 of those watches during his whole life as a watchmaker.

So it means that each of these watches has a little bit of the life of this watchmaker. It's what you spend your time on — what appears in your life, in your everyday. In the complicated world, you have at least a motion that you went through that has been put into the action. And that's one of the reasons why I also think that these complicated watches are beautiful watches, quite close to art pieces.