Are resources indiscriminately at the mercy of their extractors and users? Are things just a backdrop to human existence - created and made to wait to be filled with someone else's will to move, to act, to be valuable or superfluous? The designer and researcher Mantas Lesauskas (born in 1984) proposes different and unexpected answers to these questions in his solo exhibition "Periphery x Cor" at the Amber Museum, presenting design objects born out of his artistic research into amber. The works, the architecture of the exhibition and the exhibition space itself, which envelops the Tiškevičius Palace like an inkwell, are connected by a thread of amber imagery. Egyptian pharaohs, Greeks, Romans, medieval and later European elites, and even later empires and occupying regimes not only adorned and decorated themselves with amber, but also used it expansively as a means of achieving political goals and consolidating status. Power centres sucked up the resource, with historical records recording the once ambered shores of the Baltic Sea and the tribes of our ancestors as a distant periphery. Amber's finite resources and territorial definiteness increased its value, inspired ritual practices, charted historical and cultural vectors and fed the power machines of totalitarian ideologies. Geologically modestly defined simply as fossilised resin, amber is not limited to the pull of scientific curiosity. Historical narratives, the glamour of the gemstone, colonial practices and the search for national identity have all been gathered around it. Thanks to such a dense load of meaning, Lesauskas deservedly calls amber an active material (agency of things). In the exhibition, he invites the viewer to think through materials: to uncover the more multifaceted assumptions of the existence of materials, to reflect on the affordances and resistances of materials and things.