About the Zentrum für Peripherie

The Zentrum für Peripherie (Centre for Periphery) is consecrated to the artistic practice and strategies for the exploration of the topic ‘marginal areas’ as a general goal.

“Where lie the centres, what are peripheries, and how variable are they with respect to space and time?” These are the main questions in an abstract sense, the Zentrum für Peripherie deals by means of artistic and scientific research and application. The Zentrum für Peripherie explores the interdependency and interaction between social processes on the one side, and art and society on the other. Artists, craftsmen, architects, art curators, philosophers, and scientists are involved in conceptional aspects and in the activity of the centre. The goal is the design of spaces to enable and initiate autopoietic processes.

Starting from the historic experience that besides the development of economic and urban centres, this tendency can in particular cases also revert such that centres lose importance and drift into the periphery, one can observe that the relationship between centrality and periphery is loaded with tension, is characterized by competetion, and the aspiration for power and influence. A possible transformation of the society towards diminishing hierarchical slopes would have a defining effect on the relation of centres with peripheral areas. The Zentrum für Peripherie conceives the situation defined as ‘periphery’ as a potential, as a point of departure, as a ‘raw material’ for action, and as an open space, an area of freedom.

In a practical sense, the Zentrum für Peripherie establishes subsidiaries in the places, in which one of its projects is included. Its geographical staging basis is located in Nebelin, a small village in the middle between Berlin and Hamburg, Germany.