Valentina Soares (São Paulo, Brazil, 1982) is an artist-stylist. She explores clothing, going beyond its most common use as attire, designing and building pieces in the plastic field, such as geometric planes, skin, spaces, and objects, acting on these surfaces, tensioning conventional dimensions and understandings about habit, dressing, covering and discovering, crossing over, communicating, ritualizing, etc. In this sense, she understands clothing as an adornment—ignition for an experience-action—which has power according to the way it is installed and activated—or how it rests… Based on this approach, she has developed her work in the construction of costumes for theater, dance, performance, installations, and carnival floats. The idea of a uniform as a functional utilitarian piece and the idea of ceremonial dress are structural junctions in her research. She designs and constructs clothing as a device that mediates aesthetic values and promotes encounters of organizational, compositional, and choreographic relationships, opening new fields of meanings and subjectivities based on the interaction that is installed between people, objects, architectures, and landscapes, whether private or public, individual or collective.
Between 2014 and 2020, with friends and collaborators, she created carnival blocks, which went to the streets in the context of street carnival in São Paulo. The main argument and stimulus being a manifest desire to live on the street, they built floats, adornments, and dramaturgy of the procession. In 2019, at the invitation of the 45th Salão Nacional de Artes, they took this carnival to the streets of Bogotá, Colombia, with the Spectra Aliento – maniFESTAção group.
Since 2016, she has participated with other artists in the G>E_Grupo Maior que Eu, which is dedicated to studies and research in arts and creative processes. In 2019, she participated in the G>E de Peito Aberto, a mini-festival open to the public that brought together works by group participants and guests.
In 2018, she participated in the artist residency program, Goethe na Vila, in the Vila Itororó space, with the project Canteirinho. In 2014, she created Mescla, a brand of clothing and uniforms, which is currently a creative umbrella for her expanding field of creation in clothing.
She holds a degree in Architecture from Escola da Cidade (São Paulo, Brazil, 2006), with a specialization in Fashion from Studio Berçot (Paris, France, 2012).