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.