10/10/2026
ONE week until the start of FOS!
Meet our next artist: Rachael Xavier – Valentina Ventura XX
Valentina Ventura XX is my fashion and conceptual multimedia art practice, expressed through runway, installation, textile experimentation, bespoke garments, and other visual mediums. I create immersive worlds that move through streetwear, couture, performance, and dressing for rebellion, using fashion to explore intimacy, transformation, vulnerability, and power.
My work centers the lived experience of femininity as complex, unruly, and self-defined. I am interested in spaces where sexuality, softness, grief, beauty, aggression, and exposure can exist without being suppressed by societal expectations. Through this practice, I challenge the idea that empowerment must be respectable, restrained, or disconnected from desire.
I have been making clothing for over a decade, with experience alongside independent designers in the U.S. and U.K. My process is hands-on and intuitive, rooted in draping, direct construction on the form, hand stitching, textile manipulation, and close observation of fabric behavior. Rather than pursuing perfection as polish, I pursue emotional intensity through texture, tension, and contrast.
My garments reference lingerie, corsetry, romantic buildup and decay, and emotion as tangled three-dimensional form. I draw influence from Giallo cinema, outsider art, Victorian construction, fetishism as visual language, and designers including Vivienne Westwood and Martin Margiela.
Roses recur throughout my work as symbols of beauty, inherited roles, seduction, and resistance. I allow them to bud, blossom, bloom, dry, and be preserved as beautiful throughout their full process.
The name Valentina Ventura XX honors my mother, born on Valentine's Day, and my Sicilian family line, including my great-grandmother, a seamstress, and great-grandfather, a shoemaker. XX, drawn from "kiss kiss," marks affection and authorship. My rose and ouroboros logo reflects recurrence, transformation, and self-love.
Stop by the Fitchburg Arts Community (62 Academy St., Fitchburg) during FOS to learn more!
