Fondation Dominique Renaud - Geneva Watch Days 2026, Symposium Invitation

The Fondation Dominique Renaud’s autumn 2026 season: a conversation on the cosmological origins of time, a decisive milestone for  Memento Vivere and a new space to nurture and advance independent watchmaking.

The Fondation Dominique Renaud unveils its autumn 2026 programme: Amplitude II, the second edition of the conversation series, will explore contemporary cosmology on Thursday, 3 September 2026, in Geneva. The season brings two further developments: a decisive milestone for Memento Vivere, the watchmaking project that won the Foundation's competition with the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle (ENSCI), and a new space to bring independent watchmaking out of isolation.

An intellectual institution in its own right, based in the canton of Neuchâtel, the Fondation Dominique Renaud explores new and future representations of time. Three initiatives carry this ambition: transdisciplinary conversations that draw their audience beyond classical representations of time, an open science platform designed to bring together independent watchmakers and engineers, and an academy, now in development, which will be centred on the entrepreneurial mindset of tomorrow’s watchmaker. “What time does not know about itself”: this is the question that has driven all of its work from the outset.

Amplitude II: “The Time of the Universe, the Time We Imagine”

In September 2025, the first edition of the Amplitude conversation series at Geneva Watch Days brought authors Sylvain Tesson, Noëlle Revaz and François-Henri Désérable together around “lived time” and “written time”. The full house and the quality of the exchanges confirmed the series’ founding intuition: the question of time resonates well beyond the boundaries of watchmaking.

The Fondation Dominique Renaud turns to cosmology this time. Amplitude II, “The Time of the Universe, the Time We Imagine”, will be held on Thursday, 3 September 2026, from 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm, at the main Pavilion of the Geneva Watch Days. The panel discussion, conducted in English, begins with a question a child might ask in front of an alarm clock: is time a property of the universe, or a property of the observer?

Four leading cosmologists will make up the panel: Thomas Hertog, Janna Levin, Katie Mack and Didier Queloz, moderated by Louise Ekland. Their respective work, touching on the origins of the universe, black holes and scenarios of cosmic extinction, traces the first outlines of how we will picture time tomorrow.

Designed once again by Pierre-Henri Verlhac, this second instalment pursues the ambition present since the first edition: to keep time a living question, reconsidered from a different angle each time, and to make every edition a source of inspiration for a wide-ranging audience.

About the speakers

Thomas Hertog

A cosmologist and professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven (Catholic University of Leuven), and a former collaborator of Stephen Hawking, Thomas Hertog works on the origins of the universe and the nature of cosmological time, at the intersection of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Janna Levin

A professor at Barnard College (Columbia University) and director of the Science Studios at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, Janna Levin studies black holes, the topology of the universe and gravitational waves. In Black Hole Blues (2016), she traced the history of the first detection of a gravitational wave.

Katie Mack

A theoretical cosmologist and holder of the Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at the Perimeter Institute, Katie Mack is the author of The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (2020), which explores possible scenarios for the end of the universe.

Didier Queloz

A professor of astrophysics at the Universities of Geneva and Cambridge, Didier Queloz was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering, together with Michel Mayor, the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star. His current research focuses on the search for habitable worlds and the origins of life in the universe.

Louise Ekland

A Franco-British journalist and television host, Louise Ekland has built a career in French media spanning more than twenty years. Bilingual in French and English, she is a sought-after moderator for high-level institutional events.

Memento Vivere: the project enters its testing phase

In November 2024, the Fondation Dominique Renaud and ENSCI, the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle, jointly launched a project workshop devoted to a new approach to reading time. Eighteen months later, the winning project, Memento Vivere, led by designer Benoît Porte-Proust, reaches a concrete milestone: the team enters an active phase of materials experimentation.

The concept behind Memento Vivere rests on a principle of physical, irreversible time-marking. The fruit of a bold conceptual leap, the result, visible directly on the dial, is a progressive imprint of time lived, whose appearance changes imperceptibly through an extremely slow embossing process.

The mechanical principles of the movement have now been settled. Initial empirical tests confirm the functional hypotheses. The current phase aims to characterise the marking method. A test bench has been designed, the manufacturing of specific parts is underway, and the first trials are imminent.

The Fondation Dominique Renaud supports this process in a spirit of open science: documenting every stage, sharing methods, making the path as visible as the destination. The results of the ongoing trials will help define the direction of prototyping, the next step towards production.

A new space for independent watchmaking

How many promising ideas are lost every year for want of crossing paths, at the right moment, with the right person? Independent watchmaking has long cultivated a form of discretion, if not secrecy, around its research: each workshop kept its ideas to itself, out of caution as much as tradition. Yet the history of science teaches that openness accelerates discovery far more than it threatens it, and that an idea kept to oneself, for lack of the courage to share it, stands every chance of never coming to fruition.

The most fertile connections between distant fields of knowledge long remained a matter of chance or genius, a Marie Curie moving the boundaries between physics and chemistry. Such encounters, rare and largely accidental, remained the preserve of a handful of exceptional minds. The Fondation Dominique Renaud is now working to make systematic what once depended on chance.

The Foundation is accordingly preparing to open a collaborative space for tomorrow’s independent watchmakers and engineers: a secure place where a nascent idea can circulate, be taken up, extended and enriched by others, much like a collaborative encyclopaedia, where knowledge advances incrementally, built up by dispersed contributors. An idea developed in isolation will always remain possible, but within this space it will gain in richness.

This space will draw on an artificial intelligence engine developed by the Foundation, designed to understand the specific grammar of watchmaking: its vocabulary, its mechanical constraints, its history. Without ever substituting itself for collective work, it will help contributors verify that a line of enquiry has not already been explored elsewhere, and help advance their ideas by setting them alongside fields of knowledge that no single mind could embrace alone.

The precise contours of this space will be unveiled in the coming months. The Fondation Dominique Renaud presents, as of today, its guiding principle: a community where ideas travel, and where independent watchmaking no longer invents in isolation.

For more information, please visit dominiquerenaud.com