Since then, invitations to exhibit his work outside of Brazil have been frequent. The most recent is his participation at the Ghana Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where he is presenting the installation Um Congresso do Sal (A Congress of Salt, 2022). In 2020, a little before the beginning of the pandemic, he also did a residency at SAVVY Contemporary, in Berlin, Germany, together with the artist Laís Machado, his partner with whom he also collaborates on the platform ÀRÀKÁ. “I still think the visual arts are lacking a better understanding of the specifics of the work artists of the body do, which comes from relationships and exchanges,” Araúja comments. “But I see a good opening.”
His interest in writing and language is another characteristic of his trajectory. This was also a major distinctive trait of QUASEILHAS, sung entirely in oríkì’s – oral literature of Yorùbá origin, translated from Diego’s text written in Portuguese. It was after that experience that he started developing the Laboratório Internacional de Crioulo (International Creole Laboratory) project, in partnership with Laís Machado. Inspired by other performance art projects in which a language is developed as a group based on corporeal experiments, his idea was to have a series of encounters with people from Afro-diasporic countries to create a language that was “not born out of trauma,” a result of colonial violence. The body is the primary tool in creating this new language, which would originate from performative actions. “There would be a time for performative research that could later be used in artistic productions, with the intention of replacing trauma with poetics,” he explains.