Português
Pivô Salvador opens on August 2 (Saturday), starting at 3 PM, with Porto das Sardinhas, the first solo exhibition by artist Zé di Cabeça (Salvador, 1974) and the inaugural show at Casa do Boulevard Suíço, the new headquarters of Pivô Salvador. Curated by Ramon Martins, Porto das Sardinhas explores the poetics and artistic practice of Zé di Cabeça—an alter ego of José Eduardo Ferreira Santos, founder of the Acervo da Laje. His work began in 2018 with woodcut prints and has since expanded to drawing, painting, and writing across various media.
The exhibition unfolds through three compositional axes: Inventariar, an inventory of living things composed of pitanga fruits, ex-votos, candles, roosters, and other beings carved in wood; Imaginar, an archive of fantastical birds, proposed here as the resident species of Porto das Sardinhas; and Presentificar, a series of paintings on ceramic tiles that bring into presence a group of buildings from Salvador’s Subúrbio Ferroviário, in collaboration with artist Prentice Carvalho.
With a practice that transforms memory into image and everyday life into poetic material, Zé di Cabeça has participated in group exhibitions at MAM Rio, Museu de Arte do Rio, Itaú Cultural, the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, and Casa das Histórias in Salvador.
Visit the artist’s profile on Pivô’s website for the full biography.
Opening: August 2, Saturday, from 3 PM to 8 PM
Visiting hours: Monday to Saturday, August 4–30, from 2 PM to 7 PM
Pivô Salvador / Rua Boulevard Suíço, 11A – Nazaré
Zé di Cabeça is José Eduardo Ferreira Santos, a visual artist and educator with a background in pedagogy, psychology, and public health. José is the founder of Acervo da Laje—an important independent cultural space that brings together art, education, and memory in the Subúrbio Ferroviário of Salvador, where he was born and still lives.
His visual practice began expanding into drawing, painting, writing, and collage following a woodcut workshop in 2018. During the pandemic, his work gained new intensity, and Zé di Cabeça—a name referencing his father’s nickname—emerged more clearly. Art-making became a sensitive response to the erasures, losses, and silences permeating his territory, developing a visual poetics deeply rooted in the emotional layers of a landscape often treated as peripheral.
His work transforms memory into image and the everyday into poetic matter. Houses, churches, ruins, terreiros, fauna, medicinal plants, affective maps, train stations, ex-votos, symbols of justice, childhood fruits, traces of time, and the transformations of the suburbs—all are reimagined across various materials: tiles, reclaimed demolition wood found during walks through Porto das Sardinhas, and discarded objects carried to him by the tide.
His practice has elements of play and improvisation: he works as if playing with the city’s leftovers, the scraps of history, the colors of the days, and the textures of the sea, composing images that resist forgetting and rework the visible. Zé di Cabeça constructs an aesthetic where the reinvention of the self and of one’s surroundings is a condition for ordinary life—a life lived. His gestures—both radical and subtle—turn what once was into narrative, what seemed lost into language. This is an art that plants, plays, lights candles, invents altars, draws roosters, and, above all, affirms that the future can also be born from what we choose to remember.
Zé di Cabeça’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Art of Rio, UN Headquarters in Geneva (Switzerland), Museu das Favelas (São Paulo), Itaú Cultural (São Paulo), Tomie Ohtake Institute (São Paulo), and Casa das Histórias in Salvador (Bahia). José Eduardo Ferreira Santos has also contributed as a curator for projects at the Pinacoteca do Ceará, Museu das Favelas (Rio de Janeiro), Solar Ferrão (Bahia), and Acervo da Laje (Bahia).
Photo: Marina Muniz