Grain begins with sustenance; a single seed of rice holding nourishment, cycles and ritual, carried across fields and kitchens, into livelihood and memory. But grain is also direction and rhythm; the line running through wood, the soil that carries fertility, the dot or stroke that builds a language. To notice it is to look closely at what resists smoothness, at the smallest unit which, when multiplied, shapes entire worlds.

This week's stories remind us of that attention. In our interview with Spanish artist Asunción Molinos Gordo, whose survey exhibition is currently on view in Dubai, she draws from farming communities, presenting their age-old knowledge systems as living tools for survival. Soil, water and harvest, the basic grains of subsistence, become her art's material, showing how rural life is inseparable from global futures. Grain also resides in type. The book 'Graphic Languages', edited by Oliver Häusle, compiles visual communication styles as well as writing systems from the world over, where a single accent or

diacritical sign may alter meaning entirely. Each mark carries the weight of cultural identity, reminding us that letters are alive with history. Architecture, too, finds its grain. In a 600-year-old Chinese village, TEAM_BLDG sliced into an incongruous residence, splitting it vertically into four volumes. Each careful incision recalibrated the structure to match the fragmented grain of its locale, giving form to The Quartet, a rural art museum. And in a dialogue, grain takes the form of memory. Gaurav Ogale and Tess Joseph trace how archives and personal stories surface as threads of attention and empathy, where creative and communal cultures perform with and as care.

Grain, whether a seed of rice, a stroke of type or a fragment of memory, is what binds the larger picture. Which makes one wonder: could the larger story, the one we often overlook, be hidden in the smallest grain?