Barrage
Yalda Afsah

“For more than a century, the town of Ploral, in the southwestern Spanish region of extremadura has celebrated the idiosyncratic Jarramplas festival. Its protagonist is the costumed “el Jarrampla”, whose name derives from the Spanish word “arramplar”, meaning to steal. Legend has it that he was a man who came to the town to steal the ranchers’ animals. But he underestimated the ferocity of the locals who bombarded him with turnips until he fled. Every year in January, the townspeople re-enact the event, with one male citizen in costume with carbon fibre armour underneath) playing the Jarramplas and hundreds of others pelting him with turnips.

German-Iranian artist and filmmaker Yalda Afsah’s Jarramolas observes the annual event and its performance as well as the social context it is informed by, subtly building tension as teenagers gather in the streets, tractors deliver tones of turnips and crowds form until the fight begins. However, the Jarrampla himself is never shown. The antagonist of the city’s collective body remains a tigure outside the trame, transtorming the traditional ritual into a scenario of gratuitous violence. The turnip-throwers seem no longer participants in a folkloric game, but hooligans or street fighters. Slightly slowed down, the filmed event looks choreographed, juxtaposing a mass of bodies moving back and forth with selected faces emerging from it. As the camera zooms in on individuals, some of them show focused aggression, others enjoyment about what is going on.” Vanessa Joan Müller 2025

German-Iranian artist and filmmaker Yalda Afsah (b. 1983, Berlin) explores how space can be cinematically constructed as her films profoundly explore the interface between reality and staging. This formal characteristic of Afsah’s work is conceptually mirrored in her recent portraits of human-animal relationships that reveal an ambivalence between care and control, physical strength and broken will, instinct and manipulation. Despite their documentary focus, her films and video installations seem to capture symbiotic choreographies on screen – equally portraying and fictionalising their human and non-human protagonists. Afsah has presented her work at various exhibitions and festivals including Manifesta 13, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Berlinische Galerie, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Deichtorhallen Hamburg and recent solo exhibitions at Kunstverein München, Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Between Bridges in Berlin and JOAN in Los Angeles. She is a mentor for the Berlin program for artists (BPA) and a professor of Time-Based Media at HFBK Hamburg.