Juanjo
Pereira

Asunción, Paris, Dubai, Buenos Aires … Like many artists of his generation, Juanjo Pereira, born 1994 in Asunción, Paraguay, seems to be everywhere at once. He comes and goes, a global nomad, moving among the most disparate points of an immense yet miniaturized planet, diverse not only geographically but also economically, politically, linguistically, and culturally, bouncing between grants, funds, pitches, seminars, workshops, labs, residencies, talents … Not so long ago, such mobility might have been seen as a privilege. For Pereira, however, it is less a luxury than a necessity. He travels in order to work, and work —especially for an artist from Paraguay—is almost always elsewhere. 

Though still young and with a relatively small body of work, the five vibrant documentaries he has created bear the imprint of that contemporary condition. They are modest films—short, low-budget, hybrid—that do not conceal the contexts, circumstances, or institutional frameworks in which they were produced. Explicitly or not, they document an unstable, fragile mode of filmmaking, shaped by contingencies not always within one’s control, where autonomy is never a given starting point but—at best—a hard-won achievement. Yet this precariousness is anything but an impediment. For Pereira, it becomes the very platform from which a highly personal oeuvre can emerge—eclectic yet determined, capable of sprouting from virtually any situation. Anything can become the seed of an audiovisual work. Timing, ubiquity, a sense of opportunity: these are essential tools in the kit of the contemporary global artist. Pereira’s films arise from the always unpredictable encounter between circumstance and the desire to look, to marvel, to understand. 

It is no coincidence that the city is the privileged object of his work. Whether Latin American capitals like Asunción or Buenos Aires, modernity’s emblematic myths like Paris, or urban–capitalist alliances like Dubai, the city reappears throughout his films as an unceasing machine for producing, multiplying, and modulating relations of force. If there is a crucial word in Pereira’s lexicon, that word is tension. His films are permeated by a restlessness, a promise, an ominous latency—even in their most poetic or contemplative moments. Perhaps that suspense springs from a single, persistent astonishment: How do things hold together? How is it that a city, a society, can stand and cohere, traversed as they are by decay, violence, indifference, time, oblivion? 

Whatever register his films adopt—essay, visual haiku, first-person chronicle, archival documentary—Pereira seeks to reveal the hidden tension underpinning everything we see, starting with the one that shapes his own artistic practice: the tension between contingency and form. There is also the one that structures his audiovisual poetics: the tension between image and sound. Cinema as a tension-meter of the world. Pereira explores the tension between degradation and beauty, realism and digital simulation (Testigos en tension / Witnesses in Tension, 2020); between urban color and chromatic affect (Los pequeños eventos en gris medio / Small Events in Medium Gray, 2019); between proximity and distance (in the parallel lives of Pokhot, 2017); between geology and utopianism, analog representation and digital simulation (El futuro imposible / The Impossible Future, 2021). And finally, the tension between archive and history, the documentary image and historical meaning, staged in the feature film Bajo las banderas, el sol (Under the Flags, the Sun, 2025), an experiment in political–audiovisual archaeology in which Pereira reconstructs, through archival images, the history of General Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay—the longest dictatorship (35 years) in Latin America. 

There is, undeniably, danger in tension; hence these small, clear-sighted films often brush up against desolation or catastrophe. But if Pereira is not naive, why does he not lament? Why is there no alarm in his films? Perhaps because what they contain instead is patience and curiosity—two qualities that are not always compatible—and the intense, hopeful desire to witness the birth of what we do not yet see.  

Alan Pauls