The past is a place worth visiting: Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Made of Makers gets a Middle Eastern soul
Time+TideFine watches are often considered art, but it’s not often that watchmakers directly support art. But that’s what Jaeger-LeCoultre has been doing with its “Made of Makers” programme, a multidisciplinary series of collaborations that’s seen “the watchmaker’s watchmaker” team up with creatives as diverse as pastry chef Nina Métayer, mixologist Matthias Giroud, lettering artist Alex Trochut and most recently, Filipino webcomic artist Olivecoat. However, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s latest Made of Makers collaboration goes somewhere you wouldn’t expect a watchmaker to go: into the world of AI and photography.
It’s called ‘Bridge in Time’, and it requires a little explaining. It sees Emirati photographer Hussain Al Moosawi and Saudi AI/digital artist Mona Algwaiz collaborate on a commissioned series where Hussain’s photographs capture traditional Middle Eastern design codes – from architecture and ornament to urban details – which Mona then projects into speculative, futuristic environments through her digital practice, resulting is a set of composite images where past and future coexist within the same visual plane, Jaeger-LeCoultre explains.
This chapter of Made of Makers brings together two artists whose practices couldn’t look more different on the surface – two different dial sides of the Reverso coin, as it were. On one side, the Australian-trained Al Moosawi, over two decades deep in design, photography and visual journalism, his eye sharpened by the urban typologies of Melbourne and the overlooked modernist corridors of the UAE, provides the raw material. Photographs that chase light across arches, lattice screens and coral stone walls. Frames, as he puts it, that become “a quiet contemplation of time.”
Then, Algwaiz – a former engineer-turned-visual artist – takes those frames and does something extraordinary with them. Working at the intersection of AI, cultural heritage and speculative design, Algwaiz doesn’t overwrite Al Moosawi’s images; she extends them. Projects them forward into imagined futures where a mosque anchors time through spirituality, a coral wall breathes with memory and regeneration, a courtyard hums with Ramadan evenings not yet lived. “I work with artificial intelligence,” she says, “not to replace reality, but to extend it. Always preserving its essence.”
“Together, with ‘Bridge in Time,’ Hussain and Mona give a new perspective to the 8ᵗʰ art by creating immersive compositions where past and future flow into one another,” Jaeger-LeCoultre posits. “By confronting archival motifs with imagined cityscapes, their work stages a dialogue between continuity and transformation: how can cultural heritage be preserved while embracing innovation and new tools such as AI? This echoes the mission of the Maison: to protect an identity built over two centuries while continuously reinventing its forms, materials and techniques.”
And there it is: the precise tension that makes Jaeger-LeCoultre one of the few Maisons still capable of supporting this kind of collaboration. The Reverso, after all, is a watch built on the idea that past and present can occupy the same plane. Flip it, and you’re somewhere else entirely. Same case, different world. Similarly, the composite images Hussain and Mona have created feel like they live inside that hinge. Heritage motifs dissolving into speculative cityscapes. The threshold between what was and what could be. It asks, beautifully and without forcing an answer, how cultural identity survives innovation, and whether the question itself might be the wrong one.