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“It all begins in the mind”, as he likes to say. At one point, Denis Flageollet, Master Watchmaker and co-founder of De Bethune, began to ponder the realisation that over many years of work he had done a lot of research and made many things and objects including plenty of watches... yet perhaps still felt a deep sense of something still lacking. The need to make “one” particular object.
Recreating the universe in the form of a watch sculpture to be created gradually, in step with his feelings. An object capable of evolving. The foundations of the project were laid: it was to be a representation of the solar system with more than 63 of its satellites (among the more than 200 listed by NASA) that each revolve around their respective planets – eight in all. This depiction of our solar system would be placed in the centre of mechanisms capable of providing a great deal of astronomical information and enabling “double sympathy” (a term expressing a sense of harmony and interconnection) between a watch and a marine chronometer.
This work of truly extra-ordinary dimensions – involving thousands of gear wheels requiring major calculations and representing a number of stars never previously attempted – constitutes an apparently mad project to be conducted progressively, without being sure of ever reaching the end. It is also a pretext for passing on his art to the younger generation who are helping in this task.
The first steps of this adventure, which began to take shape recently, have been filmed since day one by TV director Olivier Ronot, a friend of Denis Flageollet. Given the scope of the project, it is fortunate that the two men enjoy a spirit of mutual trust and understanding. They will move forward together, likewise in a perpetually evolving way, in order to document the adventure through the years and the seasons in the Swiss Jura village of L’Auberson. The footage will reflect life in the workshop, the craftsmanship, the days, the hours, as well as the calm, deep, sincere and authentic rhythm pervaded by the serenity of transmission.
This creation will contain all the materials used in watchmaking and combine all the known techniques, from the file and chisel to the most advanced technologies. It will animate all the planets of the solar system as well as their main satellites, 71 celestial bodies in total.
Date, solstice, equinox, equation of time, world time, sunrise and sunset, tides: it will comprise all these and many other complications. A timepiece that will set and arm a marine clock and do the same for a watch that itself will contain multiple complications. An ode to the art of mechanics where no challenge will go unmet, where every complexity is mastered, where no mechanism will be forgotten, where the infinitely small will rub shoulders with the infinitely large, where the smallest pinion will have a diameter of less than half a millimetre and the largest wheel one of more than half a metre. An unprecedented creation.
September 08, 2022