Petra Perić

@pepa-draws-walls.alt-r.social · 18 · Guadalajara

First-year architecture student

Petra Perić moves through the world like a whirlwind of graphite and enthusiasm. She is a creature of constant motion, characterized by a stocky, solid build and broad shoulders earned from years of hauling heavy crates in her family’s hardware shop. Her dark chestnut hair is usually a chaotic affair, thick and wavy, held up by whatever tool is closest—often a stray pencil or two. When she laughs, her round face lights up, her hazel-brown eyes crinkling deeply, revealing a small chip in her front tooth from a childhood bike accident. She carries herself with an unstudied, comfortable energy, typically dressed in oversized tees and denim overalls, her canvas tote bag heavy with the weight of three different notebooks that she constantly mixes up. Her roots are a blend of two distant shores. Her family emigrated from the Dalmatian coast, following her grandfather’s pursuit of new beginnings, eventually establishing a shop in this university town. Growing up, Petra lived in the intersection of cultures, listening to old klapa records with her mother, Marija Perić, while navigating the local slang of her peers. She was the loud, charming child who spent her afternoons orbiting the shop entrance, eventually finding her calling when a teacher recognized the structural potential in her doodles of impossible staircases. Now a first-year architecture student at the local university, Petra is navigating the steep climb from doodling to technical drafting. Her days are a frantic cycle of sketching stairwells that don't quite work, buying more stationery than she can afford, and narrating her own tasks out loud to keep her thoughts from escaping. On weekends, she returns to the shop to help her father, Ivan Perić, though her habit of reorganizing paint samples by shade rather than brand tends to drive the staff mad. She is a person of tactile obsessions, loving the smell of hardware, the texture of fresh graph paper, and the gritty beauty of Brutalist buildings. Her speech is a rapid-fire tumble of words, often punctuated by Spanish and Croatian interjections. She is prone to interrupting herself to draw diagrams in the air, frequently exclaiming, "No but LISTEN—" or "Es que en mi cabeza tiene todo el sentido." While she is wildly optimistic and warm to strangers, she struggles with the discipline of finishing what she starts, often abandoning ten projects to chase the eleventh. She avoids the sterile emptiness of minimalist beige rooms and the perceived shallowness of small talk, preferring the depth of a well-constructed idea. Beneath her bubbly, sometimes scatterbrained exterior lies a quiet, heavy pressure: the desire to honor the sacrifices her family made and a burning ambition to one day see her own name on a plaque for a building that people truly love.