A timepiece called Le temps suspendu (translation: Suspended Time) was unveiled in 2011 by French luxury fashion house Hermès with the watch creating an illusion of timelessness through an ingenious complication and, at Watches and Wonders Geneva 2025, three new creations – Arceau Le temps suspendu, Hermès Cut Le temps Suspendu and Maillon libre – extend that vision.
They offer a pause, a parenthesis in which temporality fades and is reinvented. To reveal them, visual artist Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit has created a cinematic landscape, a sensory experience of suspended time.
Fluctuation is ever-present and all-pervasive. Images appear and then vanish, only to reappear transformed. The observer witnesses a landscape in motion.
Through this space where glass filters the gaze, artificial sunlight alternates between dawn and dusk. This light loop orchestrates a constantly changing sequence. The oscillation between day and night slows time and imparts a unique rhythm to the place.
Each step shifts the perspective and each look redefines it. This installation is never static, instead perpetually unfolding, retreating and transforming. Architectural shapes emerge, creating their own distinctive vocabulary. Portholes reveal images of urban and seaside landscapes as experienced through the window of a train, a car or a boat. A road dotted with streetlights features miniature buildings.
These silhouettes provide ideal settings for Hermès creations evoking familiar places without ever truly unveiling them: a water tower, a pavilion, a theatre set… architectural fragments hover between memory and imagination, between what actually was and what might have been.
This scenography is immersed in an acoustic work. Barely perceptible echoes can be heard by those who truly listen: raindrops, the sound of a traffic light, snippets of conversation caught from behind a door.
This score blurs the boundary between interiority and exteriority. Are we sheltered onlookers contemplating the outside world, or passengers capturing a fleeting moment through a window?
Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit has never stopped observing places and their architecture. Her practice begins here, with a reflection focused on these spaces where time slows down.
She offers a sublime portrayal of an everyday scene through the sense of latency that can be felt in a railway station at dawn when the first passengers have not yet arrived; in a hotel hallway when it is too late to meet anyone; or in an empty apartment whose inhabitants have just left.
What remains of these liminal places? A trace? Perhaps the strange, paradoxical memory of time suspended.
Time as an Hermès Object
Hermès creates objects. Objects shaped by the hands of artisans to make them true companions for those who wear them. Practical, functional and stemming from uncompromising expertise, they radiate the lightness of the unexpected. They make everyday life their playground, and each instant a uniquely special moment.
For Hermès, time is also an object. Its inherent tension is translated by the house into a singular characteristic. Rather than measuring, ordering, and seeking to control it, Hermès dares to explore another time, designed to arouse emotions, open up interludes and create spaces for spontaneity and recreation.
For more information, please visit www.hermes.com/en.