CURRO
2023, 28 min.
Raising questions about dependence and alienation from nature, the reciprocal dynamics of interspecies relationships and the social construction of masculinity, Yalda Afsah’s film CURRO (2023) centers on the so-called “Rapas das Bestas” – a Galician custom according to which wild horses are herded from the mountains into the valley to be sheared and marked. As a filmmaker, Afsah takes the documentary as her formal point of departure: Over long periods of time and without stage directions, she observes her human and animal protagonists alike, who hardly seem aware of the camera’s presence. In CURRO, the initial calm of the various groups of people waiting in the natural setting is gradually replaced by a growing tumult. Adolescents kick-start their cross motorcycles while others wander determinedly through the landscape equipped with backpacks and walking sticks; a young boy sits confidently in the saddle and navigates his horse through the crowd. Somewhere between a rite of passage and a family outing, it is as if we were observing a game here, the rules of which we do not know. Horses’ bodies, both wild and domesticated, are increasingly crowding the picture. The sound – characteristic of Afsah’s practice, removed from the imagery and in part artificially post-produced – creates a distance to the events unfolding on screen, reflected in the occasional impression of forlornness that the waiting people in the natural setting evoke.
The increasingly tense dynamic of this encounter between human and animal in the arena (the so-called “curro”) is brought to a halt in unexpected positions of intimacy in the eponymous film: In the moment ‘after’ the taming two of the men stand at the animal’s head, locked in what appears as a close embrace around its face to keep it calm. The artist deliberately creates moments of irritation, such as this ‘embrace’, where intimacy coexists with oppression, human (or: male) fragility with the exercise of control over others. While Afsah reveals an ambiguous balance between the species in their unusual companionship here, her film does not limit the viewers to one perspective or the other. In the various rituals and institutionalized practices of domestication documented in Afsah’s ongoing series of films, the demarcations between care and dependence, ‘nature’ and its cultivation are both revealed and complicated. What manifests itself throughout is a fundamental vulnerability to each other.
Linnéa Bake