Performance Art

Performance Art is the line that takes to its furthest extreme the second "F" in the brand's name, that of "Friends": while the Horological Machines and Legacy Machines are already born from the dialogue between Maximilian Büsser and independent watchmakers or designers, with Performance Art it is an already-existing execution — a catalog Horological Machine or Legacy Machine — that is handed to a creative partner outside the brand for a radical reinterpretation, almost always in an extremely limited series or even as a single unique piece. MB&F explicitly distinguishes this line from the "Co-Creations," the parallel production of clocks and tabletop automatons made with partners such as L'Épée 1839, Reuge and Caran d'Ache: Performance Art always concerns a wrist watch from the MB&F range, not a new object.

Among the collaborators who have taken part in this line are leading names in independent watchmaking and jewelry: Bulgari reinterpreted the LM FlyingT in the "Allegra" variant and worked on a Serpenti execution in collaboration with MB&F; the independent manufacture H. Moser & Cie revisited both the LM101 and — the other way around, applying the MB&F aesthetic to one of its own models — the Streamliner, in the "Pandamonium" series; enamel artist Eddy Jaquet has signed several fire-enamel dial executions on HM and LM bases over different years; the craft collective Black Badger, specialized in rare materials such as fordite and fluorescent minerals, has produced a series of special editions mainly on the HM6. Unique pieces made for the Only Watch charity auction also recur over time, on bases such as the HM2, HM4, HM8 and HM10.

Each Performance Art piece is presented by the brand as a work in its own right, with its own distinctive name (Moonmachine, Moonmachine 2, JwlryMachine, HM2.2 Black Box, among others) rather than as a simple color or material variant of the base reference: this is what conceptually distinguishes the line from the ordinary color executions available within MB&F's other collections, and makes it a testing ground for the brand itself too, which observes how its own aesthetic is read and transformed by creative sensibilities entirely outside its own atelier.