Zé di Cabeça is José Eduardo Ferreira Santos (1974), a visual artist and educator trained in pedagogy, psychology, and public health. He 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 lives.

Beginning with a woodcut workshop in 2018, his visual research expanded into drawing, painting, writing, and collage. During the pandemic, his work gained new intensity, and Zé di Cabeça—a name referring to his father’s nickname emerged more clearly. Artistic practice became a sensitive response to the erasures, losses, and silences that cross his territory, developing a visual poetics deeply rooted in the affective layers of a landscape often labeled peripheral.

Zé di Cabeça builds an aesthetic in which the reinvention of the self and of the surroundings is a prerequisite for ordinary life, “lived” life. His gesture, both radical and subtle, transforms what once was into narrative, what seemed lost into language. It 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 one chooses to remember.

His work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Museu de Arte do Rio, the UN Headquarters in Geneva (Switzerland), Museu das Favelas (SP), Itaú Cultural (SP), Tomie Ohtake (SP), and Casa das Histórias de Salvador (BA).

Untitled (2025) is part of Velas, a long-running series in which the artist transforms wooden remnants gathered from the waters of Porto das Sardinhas, in the Subúrbio Ferroviário of Salvador, into small lit candles, each carrying a unique flame. Made from demolition wood and acrylic paint, the candles evoke ex-votos and gestures of popular devotion, accompanying the artist’s healing process after an accident in the sea. Between the sacred and the everyday, they keep alight what insists on living, even at dusk.

Works from this series are currently on view in the group exhibition A terra, o fogo, a água e os ventos – Por um Museu da Errância com Édouard Glissant, at Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, and in the artist’s first solo exhibition, Zé di Cabeça – Porto das Sardinhas, at Pivô Salvador.