Inspiration Source
Super El Niño could cause global food price shock lasting into 2028, analysts say
This article is relevant to **survival and famine** and to **atmosphere and weather as metaphor** because it links climate conditions, food insecurity, and the language of systemic stress. It emphasizes how weather extremes and climate volatility increasingly shape public debate about scarcity, resi... Full context
This article is relevant to **survival and famine** and to **atmosphere and weather as metaphor** because it links climate conditions, food insecurity, and the language of systemic stress. It emphasizes how weather extremes and climate volatility increasingly shape public debate about scarcity, resilience, and inequality.
Ledger of Scarcity: Atmospheres of Survival
Ledger of Scarcity: Atmospheres of Survival binds meteorological record to the language of hunger. Using the Ame-Kioku Press and pigments reclaimed from temple shrines, I printed torn pages from the Nong Saeng flood ledger and impressions of rice stalks, then scraped and scored the surfaces until they read like weathered stone. The triptych's stamped numerals and etched isobars read as both accounting and sky-chart: numbers of mouths, measures of rainfall, margins of deficit. The central fissure is a wound and a horizon—a place where climate and bureaucracy meet to decide who eats and who waits.
Accompanying the reliefs is a low soundscape sonified from microburst recordings and seasonal rainfall data, composed with Emiko Tanaka. The audio paces the viewer, its bell-like pulses echoing the faint metal inlays in the panels, turning archival paper and scraped lacquer into a living ledger of stress. I ask viewers to hold the tension between ritual and calculation, to feel how atmospheric volatility becomes a metaphor and mechanism of scarcity, and to listen for the human traces—voices, ledger marks, and storm breath—embedded in the work.
About the Artist
Somchai Ito
Somchai Ito (Pronouns: they/them) is a socially engaged visual artist whose work excavates the uneven seams of globalization and memory. Born in a small Southeast Asian town and later living for many ...
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Marco Delacroix
Cultural theorist and curator. Reads art through lenses of discourse, power, and social context.
As Marco Delacroix I approach Ledger of Scarcity: Atmospheres of Survival as a discipline in which archival labor and atmospheric calculation converge. Somchai Ito stages a remarkably clear proposition, the ledger as body and the sky as accounting room, and follows it through with formal rigor. The triptych format and the central fissure work together as both wound and horizon, a site where meteorology and bureaucracy are allowed to decide human value. There is an explicit, productive tension between ritual provenance and administrative coldness, and the work refuses easy reconciliation between those registers.
Material choices are not decorative afterthoughts, they are the argument. Pigments reclaimed from temple shrines, scraped lacquer and relief printing produce surfaces that read as worn monument and bureaucratic page at once. The stamped numerals and etched isobars function as performative text, they do not simply represent scarcity, they enact accounting. The scraped surfaces and the faint metal inlays give a tactile insistence to absence, while the shadowed silhouettes beneath the soil suggest the social underside of those ledger marks. One might fault the piece for a certain legibility that risks schematic reduction, but mostly this is a deliberate clarity meant to summon ethical attention.
The collaboration with Emiko Tanaka on the sonified microburst and rainfall data deepens the work s pacing. The bell like pulses and the metallic echoes create a tempo that guides rather than instructs, turning archival paper into a living register of stress. Read against the reporting of a looming Super El Nino and its food price shocks, the work becomes urgent, it stages how climate volatility is already adjudicating who eats and who waits. As institutional critique the piece is both elegy and indictment, restrained in ritual manner yet sharp in its insistence that scarcity is produced, counted, and therefore contestable.
Materiality and reclaimed pigments Sound integration and pacing Ritual versus bureaucracy Archival and archival aesthetics Surface texture and relief printingAug 9, 2026