Spanish sculptor moved by the pain of Indian migrant women, casts their suffering in stone

Isabela Lleo, offbeat artist, sculptor, digital and multi-media innovator, was disturbed when she saw photographs of millions of migrant workers in India hitting the highways and walking back home after the sudden lockdown in March this year without any preparation or warning.

Such a mass movement of the poorest of the poor has not been witnessed in any country of the world.

She was especially moved by the plight of women workers. She saw them trekking in their worn-out sarees, holding sacks of all their belonging on their head, clutching little children to their bodies, or holding them by their fingers, in their long march across thousands of miles.

She saw them as resilient and stoic despite looking emaciated, thirsty and starving; she saw the masses moving as a ‘moment of tragic migration’. She saw them as the other half of the sky and earth, brutalised by the market, modernity and industrialization.

“Since some time, I have been following historian and curator Amrit Gangar’s Facebook posts.

His comments on literature, philosophy, cinema, poetry, etc. are so incredibly interesting. When he started his posts about the migrant workers, it touched me as the pandemic is worldwide and a global opportunity for reflection.

In one of his posts he specifically said that artists shouldn’t look away from the pandemic situation. I realised that I was painting my surroundings and not expressing suffering, which I could perceive, far away, and nearby,” she told me in an interview when I spoke to her for Hard News.

She started making sculptures of the hardworking Indian women migrant workers, with Corona stalking their surroundings, their life an infinite march from one despair to another. Her own peaceful life in the quiet island of Mallorca in Spain was disturbed as she worked to render the working class women in her sculptures, making them an universal symbol of stoic resilience and eternal suffering.

She believes that this pandemic should provide an authentic critique of the current lifestyle of excessive consumption. She feels that civilizations should reunite with nature and rural life, adopt environmentally sound ways of everyday life, reject this obsession with insatiable materialism, and practice love, sensitivity, compassion and care, the higher ideals of humanism.

Her work on migrant women workers in India is currently being shown in a Church in Germany. “The project is called W.I.R. — organised by the German sculptor, Herbert Hundrich. On November 7, it will be shown in Palma de Mallorca in the ‘Finis Africae’ library, which is a cultural space.