I’m Valentina – a Chilean singer‑songwriter, poet, author, and visual artist based in Scotland. I am a second generation refugee from Chile. My creative practice is a meeting place for music, language, memory, and movement. I work across disciplines to explore themes of exile, identity, resistance, and tenderness, always searching for the social truth that lives beneath the surface. My roots and my voice are anchored in Latin America, where every word carries the pulse of my land. Through song, poetry, and visual storytelling, I weave together the intimate and the collective, the personal and the political. We create tapestries of melodies and words.
Bordado’ in Spanish means to adorn or embroider a cloth, or other material. Or to reproduce a figure with embroidery. Or to execute something with artistry and skill (DLE definition). For us it means all of those and more. It is also a reference to the Chilean arpilleras or patchworks, crafted and sown by hand and which during the dictatorship came to be one of the many ways women were able to express their suffering to the world. But we don’t call ourselves ‘canto bordado’. We say ‘bordao’, the way it is spoken colloquially, not the way it is written in books.