1974, lives and works at Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

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