Diego Araúja started thinking about time for one very basic reason: something was missing. Since he was young, he found himself defeated by “the time to survive,” as he came to call it. The self-explaining term is a known reality for those who have a debilitating work routine and no space for anything else. Even more familiar for Black people living in Brazil. “I started being interested in time because it was something I never had,” the Bahian artist explains. “From where I come from, the time to survive leaves no space for creative time; doing something creative is almost reckless or even vindictive.”
Raised on the outskirts of Salvador, Bahia, where today he is a leading figure in dramatic arts and performance, thinking about other formats of temporality and perception came to be a central element in the artist’s production. Since 2013, Diego began developing a process of “Estética Para um Não-Tempo” (Aesthetics for a Non-Time), his intent to establish a “qualitative time that enables the production of emancipated Afro-diasporic memories,” as he defines it. His best-known work, where he put those concepts into practice, was the play QUASEILHAS (Almostislands, 2018), which he directed in collaboration with people from various fields, bringing him closer to the field of expanded or transdisciplinary art.