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.
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.