How Do You Hold the Future? Portraits for Spica 

to glean (verb) 

To gather grain or other crops left behind after harvest. Historically associated with those who collected what remained in the fields after the reapers had passed: the poor, widows, migrants, laborers, survivors 

Visitors are invited to hold a real sheaf of wheat and have their portrait taken. The action echoes a long lineage of those that have held the grain: Virgo holding Spica, Demeter with her bundle, workers in the fields, the gleaners of Millet, Ithell Colquhoun holding it as if casting a spell, Agnès Varda posing with wheat in The Gleaners and I. 

Spica, the bright star in Virgo’s hand, often associated with gifts, is also a star that is tied to continuity and to what must be gathered and carried forward. The symbol of the bunch of wheat always contains a gaze towards the future. 

The wheat object itself is handmade from foraged materials gathered on site in Berlin, following the logic of gleaning: nothing wasted and everything holding potential. What remains after harvest becomes vital material for renewal and the continuation of life. 

Participants choose how to hold the grain. Across the chest, under the arm, lifted like a wand, a tool, a weapon, a child. The invitation asks them to consider the weight of the future. How do we carry life forward? How do we hold belief in the future? How do we hold these questions in our bodies? 

Holding has many associations: care, labor, burden, offering, ritual, nourishment. The work turns this gesture into an image archive where each participant becomes a contemporary Spica, holding both the remnants of the harvest and the possibility of another season ahead.

2026

Mixed media installation and photographic performance

Variable dimensions (curtain approximately 200 × 200)

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