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.

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.