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.
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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