There is a particular kind of work that does not begin with a blank page. It begins with an archive. With documents held in institutions that were not built for speed. With names that appear in one record and vanish from another. With objects that survived not because anyone planned for their survival, but because…
In the middle of the 19th century, when the Swiss valleys still worked by candlelight and precision was measured by touch rather than by instrument, there was a small atelier in La Chaux-de-Fonds bearing a name already whispered with respect — Courvoisier Frères.
The brothers who ran it were men of patient ambition. They sought…
