The modern world has long been organized through binaries — nature and culture, centre and periphery, body and machine, life and nonlife. These oppositions shaped not only thought but also the global infrastructures of extraction and representation. The so-called centre, holding the means of visibility and control, defined what the periphery was allowed to be: raw, primitive, or resourceful, depending on its usefulness.
Yet the boundaries between these poles are now dissolving. Digital networks, ecological collapse, and post-pandemic forms of interdependence have revealed how fragile and entangled this order truly is. What was once peripheral becomes central in other ways — as a site of resilience, repair, and situated knowledge.
Peripheria x cor emerges within this shifting terrain. The project challenges inherited imaginaries of the Baltic region — often framed as rustic, manual, and low-tech — by exposing the politics of such narratives. It seeks to rethink what “periphery” can mean when the heart (cor) of the system begins to beat elsewhere: in the overlooked, the reclaimed, and the slow material intimacies that refuse the logic of extraction.
Amber
Do resources simply subject to the whims of their extractors and users?
Are objects merely a backdrop to human existence – created and waiting to be filled with foreign will to act, be valuable, or be unnecessary?
Egyptian pharaohs, Greeks, Romans, medieval and later European elites, and subsequently, empires and occupying regimes not only adorned themselves with amber but also expansively used it as a mean to pursue political goals and establish status. Centers of power drew resources into themselves, recording once-distant peripheries, such as the amber-rich shores of the Baltic Sea and our ancestors' tribes, into written history.
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Stone
Is matter ever truly still, or does it only appear so to those who refuse to listen? Can stone, so often treated as mute foundation, bear witness, remember, and even resist?
Imported to Soviet Lithuania from distant quarries, marble once clad the interiors of power — polished into symbols of permanence, order, and collective aspiration. As these architectures crumble, fragments reemerge from rubble, carrying within them the sediments of ideology, desire, and decay.
Bound with concrete and history, marble reveals its restless vitality. What once monumentalized authority now circulates as debris, as relic, as research material. To collect marble rubble is to gather fragments of empire — to sense how stone remembers, how it acts, how it outlives us.
For we are, after all, walking, talking stones — animated minerals wandering through layers of time, meeting again the matter from which we came.
Timber
Can a scar become a site of beauty, a burl a form of resilience?
For centuries, trees from what is now Lithuanian territory have carried the weight of both devotion and dispossession. From the sacred groves and roadside crosses to the polychrome wooden sculptures of the Middle Ages, timber became a vessel for belief, care, and craft — a way to give spirit to matter. Wood from northern forests was shipped outward, its fibers transformed into sacred figures across Europe — many medieval sculptures carved from the bodies of our forests.
Karelian birch, that luminous and veined anomaly, bears the marks of pain. Cherished for its rarity, it was harvested by imprisoned intellectuals in Soviet gulags and later returned to Lithuania as a polished veneer of prestige. Its swirling patterns echo the cold geographies of displacement; its allure, the quiet violence of the periphery made ornamental.
To hold a piece of such wood is to touch a living archive — one that breathes, bends, and decays, yet never ceases to tell stories. In its scent and texture, we meet both the forest and the exile, the sacred and the scarred.
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Cement
Portland cement — the gray dust that built the modern age — is among the most destructive materials ever made. Each ton of it releases nearly its own weight in carbon dioxide. Quarried limestone and fossil fuels are burned together to make a binder that holds up our cities while quietly eroding the planet beneath them. Concrete has become our geological signature — the artificial stone of the Anthropocene, layered across continents in endless slabs of roads, runways, and walls.
Yet this is not the only way to build. Long before the industrial furnace, our ancestors understood that matter could bind through chemistry and time rather than combustion. The Romans, mixing volcanic ash, lime, and seawater, created a concrete that strengthened as it aged — alive to the elements, not opposed to them. Its ruins still stand, not in defiance of nature, but in conversation with it.
Today, such knowledge returns in the form of geopolymer cement — a mineral binder that echoes ancient formulas while dramatically reducing emissions. Instead of burning limestone to ash, it recomposes silicates and aluminosilicates at low temperatures, allowing stone to become stone again through gentler means. It is less an invention than a remembering — a gesture toward continuity rather than extraction.
If Portland cement embodies the arrogance of control, geopolymer cement gestures toward repair: a material that listens to its own chemistry, that cures in harmony with the world instead of against it. To work with it is to unlearn speed, to let matter set on its own terms. In its surface, the future of building feels older — humbler, slower, and more porous to the life around it.
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