Barrage
Yalda Afsah

Yalda Afsah, Jarramplas

For more than a century, the town of Piornal, 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 Jarramplas 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 tonnes 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 figure outside the frame, transforming 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.

Never providing a complete picture of what is happening, Afsah’s cinematically constructed space unfolds at the interface of reality and staging. Beginning with an impression of a remote rainy town, the quiet of the streets is gradually replaced by a growing tumult. Moments of irritation intensify as bodies move closer together and the individual is absorbed into the crowd. It is as if the narrowing of the camera’s field of vision corresponds to the force of the attack on the absent symbolic enemy.

Afsah combines documentary filmmaking with a conceptual approach to analyse the tensions of human interaction and the social construction of gender and behaviour. Her previous films have focused on the agency of non-human beings and how we interact with them. Carefully observing power, care and submission in relation to the training of animals, Afsah’s intimate views of social dynamics between species portray, but also fictionalise, humans and animals alike, highlighting the inherent ambivalence in their encounters. With Jarramplas, the focus shifts to ritual, group dynamics and the eruption of violence among humans and the impact these catalysts have on the social order of society.

As in her previous films, Afsah denies the viewer a position of neutral observation. Using formal approaches that raise questions of construction and objectivity, she explores the relationship between subject and object, while still allowing for the viewer’s subjective interpretation. The sound, which is removed from the images and artificially post-produced, creates a distance to what is happening on the screen. At times it feels distinctly unnatural, further emphasising the artificiality of the situation. At the same time, it draws the viewer’s attention to a particular frame and directs their gaze.

At the end, the crowd comes to a halt, as if realising that the game has got out of hand. Some faces show signs of fear. There is a tense waiting and a state of uncertainty, now shared between the characters on the screen and the spectators in front of it.

Vanessa Joan Müller, 2025