In physics, a vector is a representation of a quantity that has origin, direction and sense. These are the three key elements which guided us when we founded the Vector association in Iasi in spring 2001. It was, actually, a natural evolution after five years of previous experience in organising the Periferic Festival. The direction and the sense of our group, formed by young artists and philosophers from Iasi, were to create a local scene and to make it visible nationally and internationally.

The most important project is the Periferic Contemporary Art Biennial that has been this year at the seventh edition. From 2004, we have developed the project called cARTier, which aims at restoring socially and culturally a district in Iasi, and we have opened the Vector Gallery where we organise exhibitions and various education programmes. The gallery programme functions as part of a more comprehensive strategy that seeks to create a regional art centre in Iasi, within a network of similar institutions from Romania, Serbia, Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Turkey. For this, we launched in January 2006 the first issue of Vector magazine as a theoretical platform for the exhibitions and workshops organised in the gallery; we run throughout the year a regional residency programme, and develop a database of art projects from the region called VAD (Vector Art Data Bank), displayed within the Periferic 7 Biennial framework from 7th May 2006.

The Vector project represents a long term engagement based on the analysis of the social and politic context of Iasi and on the aim at creating a local identity that will shortly become a brand, a town at the border between European Union and the ex-Soviet space.