Producer
In 1877, in a watch factory in a valley in north-western Switzerland, Josephine produces balance spindles, tiny parts that ensure the agitation movement ("unrueh") of the mechanical watches. She soon grows uneasy with the organisation of work and possession in the village and its factory and joins the anarchist worker movement of the local watchmakers. There she meets Piotr Kropotkin, a moony Russian traveller. The two of them meet at a time when new technologies such as time measurement, photography and the telegraph are transforming the social order and anarchist discourse is addressing emerging nationalism. During a walk in the woods, Josephine and Piotr ask themselves whether time, money and the government are not all but fictions.
Producer
In 1887, Peter Kropotkin stayed briefly in the Swiss Jura, fiefdom of the watchmaking industry and epicentre of the international anarchist movement. He would retain a strong impression of his encounter with the highly organised local workers, whose “equalitarian relationships and independent thought” he would praise in his diary. 140 years after the “conversion” of this man who was to theorise libertarian communism a little later on, Cyril Schäublin restages fragments of this diary read in Russian, in the current setting. A place in which his ancestors, who worked from generation to generation in the watchmaking manufactures of this region until their closure, still survive.
