In the backyard of the Acervo da Laje, between one conversation and the next, Zé di Cabeça wonders whether the canjarana tree has borne fruit. It hasn’t flowered yet—so he hasn’t painted it on one of the pieces of wood he collects from the waters of the bay at Porto das Sardinhas, in the area known as the Subúrbio Ferroviário—the Railway Suburb—of Salvador.

This seemingly anecdotal connection between the ripening of the canjarana and the creation of a new artwork reveals what we propose here as one of the most profound aspects of Zé di Cabeça’s poetics: his work doesn’t precede his experience of place; it grows with it, expands like his backyard, and takes shape in the time of things that take root and bloom.

Zé di Cabeça is the artist brought to life by José Eduardo Ferreira Santos, known to friends also as Zé Eduardo. Zé—whether di Cabeça or Eduardo—is an artist and educator trained in pedagogy, psychology, and public health. Together with his partner, Vilma Santos, he founded the Acervo da Laje.

More than an artistic and cultural space in the heart of the Subúrbio Ferroviário—where Zé and Vilma were born and still live—the Acervo is an independent initiative that brings together memory and education through art and research rooted in the territory.

Rather than focusing on the violence so often featured in news about the region, the Acervo opens a crack in the dominant imaginary that insists on presenting itself as truth. Through art and informal education—including weekly activities for school-age children, groups of mothers, and young artists from the surrounding area—the space reconfigures what’s possible.

In this sense, the Acervo functions as a sociocultural hub capable of imagining futures—and, more importantly, of building presents. Not just for those who come from outside and engage with the stories woven about the place, but especially for those who live here and seek to inhabit other ways of understanding the suburb.

With questioning as his modus operandi, Zé embraces art as a force for collective transformation and the driving energy of his own life—destabilizing segregationist policies and challenging dishonest narratives that ignore how space is shaped by what can be voiced.

Beginning with a woodcut workshop in 2018, Zé Eduardo’s visual research expanded into drawing, painting, and writing across various media. The pandemic marked the significant expansion of his artistic practice, as teaching shifted to mandatory digital formats.

Zé di Cabeça—named after his father’s nickname—began to emerge more clearly, though still somewhat modestly as an artist, producing work that moves between exhaustive repetition and spontaneous variation. His art practice is both a continuation and an integral part of the wider activities at Acervo da Laje, as well as a path toward reinventing himself.

His initial artistic experiments during the woodcut workshop focused on visual studies of plant species found in the Subúrbio Ferroviário, especially those traditionally used for medicinal purposes. Just as the process of painting the canjarana tree follows the rhythms of his backyard—waiting for the tree to bear fruit—there is a clear connection between Zé di Cabeça’s early work and the ethic of care he practices toward all living and cultivated things.

A drawing of these cultivated plants presents not the result of a mere representational exercise but an artistic process that sparks a symbiotic relationship between body and territory. Representation here becomes more than visual documentation; painting the suburb means reimagining the relationships that sustain life rooted there.

What begins as an exercise in cataloging the diversity, regional complexity, and “beauties of the suburb”—the title Zé gave to a 2013 exhibition at Acervo—becomes an urgent call for an ethics of care toward everything chosen to be remembered.

First, on paper: houses, churches, ruins, terreiros, fauna, vegetation, ex-votos, affective maps, train stations, symbols of justice, childhood fruits, traces of time, and changes in the environment. Then, these images are reworked across different materials: tile, found demolition wood, and discarded objects brought to him.

His work transforms memory into image and daily life into poetic matter, or vice versa—resisting erasure, affirming existence, and opening new horizons from what unfolds in the present.

Unlike colonial traditions that describe and frame the Other—whether through exogenous “scientific” expeditions or by imposing grammars of control on vernacular knowledge and practices—Zé di Cabeça moves through his territory as one who relearns how to see, name, and compose.

In his own time, he creates a new sensitive regime around the suburb. His work summons an imagination woven from within, not imposed from above, disrupting dominant grammars by inventing a distinct, sophisticated, and sharp language capable of speaking about what has always been right before our eyes.

As the hosts of Pivô Salvador’s inaugural exhibition, presented experimentally, we are honored to welcome the artist Zé di Cabeça to our venue on Boulevard Suíço for his first solo exhibition. Through the selection of his works presented here, we invite visitors to see the artist as one who disrupts an institutionalized grammar, proposing instead a new one—powerful in its ability to help us re-map the Subúrbio Ferroviário region of Salvador.

As a political gesture, his storytelling constructs statements that challenge stigma and invisibility, offering legibility and dignity to what is often the target of deliberate exclusion and silencing.

In a broad and everyday sense, grammar establishes a set of relations that organize language—whether verbal, visual, bodily, or symbolic. Philosophically, grammar is what structures thought or organizes expression, shaping our perception of the world.

But when a specific grammar is imposed on unique ways of thinking and doing—rooted in informal knowledge, empirical understanding, and lived experience—it tends to erase the intelligences that emerge from those territories. It is against this imposition that Zé di Cabeça stands. His work doesn’t simply represent his place of origin and daily life; it builds a symbolic system through which the suburb can express itself, imagine itself, and remake itself.

This alternative grammar is shaped through relationships among infra-ordinary elements—those that, as Georges Perec helps us understand, lie beneath the spectacular and the obvious. What matters are the smallest details, the deviations in repetition, the subtle variations that escape an automatic, hurried gaze.

Among a hundred lit candles, none is identical—and in each one burns an irreproducible difference. Within this grammar resides the same pulsing force that makes the canjarana tree bear fruit and brings Porto das Sardinhas into existence.

With a selection of some of the series developed by the artist, we present here three compositions: inventorying, imagining, and making present.

Inventorying: An inventory of living things, composed of pitanga, ex-votos, candles, roosters, and other beings carved in wood. The pitanga is a fruit that evokes childhood memories and, not by chance, the word means “child” in Tupi. Each pitanga signals the artist’s long-standing desire to pursue research into the fruit within a broader Brazilian history. The ex-votos, created following an accident in different waters, accompany his healing process and reflect his interest in forms of devotion to life. The candles—which, as Zé notes, must never be extinguished—recall what remains alight, even at dusk in Porto das Sardinhas. The roosters are born from encounters with friends, collaborations, and especially from what the artist calls “ancestral words,” drawn from works such as Macunaíma by Mário de Andrade and Mitologias dos Orixás (Mythology of the Orixás) by Reginaldo Prandi.

Imagining: An archive made of fantastical birds, which we propose here as native species of Porto das Sardinhas. These birds emerge from close readings of O tupi na geografia nacional (Tupi in the National Geography) by Teodoro Sampaio and O negro e o garimpo em Minas Gerais (Black People and Gold Mining in Minas Gerais) by Aires da Mata Machado Filho. Seen by the artist as studies for tile paintings, they push beyond the boundaries of the medium, as if unwilling to remain confined to a 15-by-15-centimeter square. Here, the birds take over the entire page, ready for flight.

Making present: A series of tile paintings that bring into the present a set of buildings from the Subúrbio Ferroviário of Salvador, in collaboration with artist Prentice Carvalho. Faced with transformations that threaten the region’s built heritage—whether from real estate speculation or violent urbanization—Zé di Cabeça creates ways to preserve what is on the verge of disappearing.

Through these gestures—inventorying, imagining, and making present—we are invited to consider how Zé di Cabeça disrupts an existing grammar in order to reimagine the Subúrbio. Here, memory and invention do not stand in opposition, nor do they seek a time already lost; instead, they activate the task of envisioning the future by systematizing what lives.