Exhibition guide
Lucas Erin. La ronde

Lucas Erin’s work revolves around installation, sculpture and sound. Interested in the notion of contact of which objects are the trace, attentive to the relationship between inside and out and the shifting boundary separating the two, Erin explores, through concise gestures, what unfolds or fails in an exchange. Questions of circulation and sharing are central to his thinking. His found objects and carefully manufactured sculptures contain both the threads of interwoven stories and clues to narratives in the making. Inspired by thinkers of creolisation, revisiting his Martinican heritage through the prism of his connection to the land and the plants that grow there, the artist works by associations, reappropriations, and shifts that allow new possibilities to emerge in the exhibition space.

It is between the island of Martinique and his studio in Lausanne, from his grandmother’s garden, where abundant flora and fauna thrive, and in the course of conversations on both sides of the Atlantic that the artist has conceived his exhibition. Its title—La ronde—conjures up the stroll through the garden at dawn. It refers to the rhythms of the seasons and of vegetation across different latitudes, but also to the various timescales that overlap in a single place: the deep time of nature at grips with the accelerated pace of its exploitation and transformation, as well as the time of colonial history and its ramifications in the reality and imagination of the present. The materials used by the artist—whether bronze, burnt sand, or cable sheaths—convey and condense questions of temporality and circulation, of one material state to another, of one place to another, of one period of time to another.

Bronze petals formed by pouring molten metal from a crucible are scattered on a wall, falling to the floor at irregular intervals (Lyannaj, 2026). Held together in the shape of flowers by coloured cable sheathings, the petals bring to mind a garden in bloom. Through their materiality, dropping bronze petals also evoke other kinds of falls—those of bronze monuments which, were it not for the collective will to keep them standing as symbols of violent colonial histories, would eventually collapse of their own accord. But unlike monuments, Erin’s petals are fragile, ever-changing objects that fall and continue their life on the ground, before returning to the wall only to fall once more. They circulate, they are in motion.

Movement can be read in the objects even when they are static. Such is the case with the crucibles dotting the walls, in which one can still see the last drops of the molten bronze (Ti Gout, 2026). They recall conduit systems through which water or electricity flows.

In Ti Biten (2026), bronze undergoes a constant metamorphosis through contact with unstable and shifting materials—burnt sand, graphite, and electricity. The very title of the piece is evocative. Ti biten means “a little thing” in Creole and sounds like the French word butin, booty or plunder, an allusion to both something reclaimed and something taken by force. It is therefore always a question of circulation, of words and goods, of what is stolen away and what returned—or not. Yet from circulation, whether voluntary or forced, a form of connection is invariably born.

The question of connection has been present in the artist’s work from the outset, as evidenced by a piece from 2014, Untitled (Darren Roshier), a wallet containing all of an individual’s personal documents—their ID, bank cards, lucky keepsakes, and loose change. An eminently precious and intimate object, the wallet here is exposed to the curiosity of visitors and tests the trust required for its display, whilst evoking multiple forms of exchange—from monetary transactions to switching identities.

On a USM table, the artist has laid out prints that evoke the legacies of colonialism in the very way of representing a place. Working from a tourist map of Martinique, the artist reframes fragments that simultaneously magnify certain details as if seen through a spyglass and obscures others (Île aux fleurs, 2026). The island is offered up not as a good to be consumed but as a complex reality to decipher.

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