For the second episode of our Musical Road to WOMEX, we go from Caracas to Berlin by way of a conservatory in Barquisimeto, the route that shaped Gotopo into one of the more unclassifiable voices on the Afro-Latin Dance circuit. She runs Afro-Indigenous Venezuelan rhythm through techno production until neither side gives way, calls the result Ancestral Futurism, and stages it with a female-warrior aesthetic built as much for main-room dancefloors as festival fields.
She started at the conservatory in Barquisimeto and came up through El Sistema, the youth-orchestra system that’s put instruments in the hands of generations of Venezuelan kids. She left for Berlin afterward and started over, busking to get by while she learned German. Her stage name comes from her own family history: Gotopo was the last indigenous chief of the region her family comes from. Nobody in her family had kept that history. She found it herself, digging through records nobody else had bothered to look at. She’s described the discovery as grief and celebration arriving together, something erased and something recovered in the same breath. Her 2023 debut EP, Sacúdete, followed, released on Waxploitation, the label built around Gnarls Barkley and Danger Mouse, with Don Elektron and Bomba Estéreo’s Simón Mejía among the collaborators.
The reach has widened fast since. The title track ended up soundtracking Major League Soccer’s entire 2024 season, and a newer single, “Mi Gente Lo Siente,” is currently running under the trailer for Valorant Masters 2026. This October she brings that sound to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria at WOMEX’s Club Summit, the strand built around club and electronic sound from across the world.
You trained in the conservatory and El Sistema, then found your own voice in Europe by reaching back to your Afro-Indigenous roots. What was the turning point that set that direction?
When you take distance you start seeing things you never noticed before or comprehend them much deeper and from new points of view. The music conservatory planted in me a seed of discomfort of existing inside a music education that was so Eurocentric. Then ironically enough, it was Europe that gave me the space to explore how an ancestor of the future could exist in 202+.
WOMEX lands this year in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, an Atlantic island whose timple itself carries old Latin American trade routes back across the ocean. As a Venezuelan artist, what are you most curious to discover about that shared history there?
Because of the mass migration of Venezuelans I learnt that there’s a huge Canarian community in Venezuela spanning a few decades, people who saw in Venezuela a place to thrive, which it was, and now of course, it’s a reversed migration of kids and grand-kids back to Canaria… I’m obsessed with history and this one promises to be a huge adventure: What dishes will I taste here that will remind me of home? Or maybe slang words that were Venezuelan and landed here, or the opposite? It’s sooo weird in a cool way, I’m so curious!
Your work fuses ritual and rave, the sacred and the synthetic. In a WOMEX programme full of traditions, what makes that fusion distinctly yours, and what do you want people to take from your showcase?
Groove and vocals are the 2 cores of the most ancient musical memories we hold as humans… sometimes I think that we sang before we even spoke. I always want to make sure that my music makes you move, to me there is nothing more ancestral than groove, and in a Gotopo show you will hardly leave without having collectively sang along with a bunch of strangers 🙂
WOMEX always sparks unexpected meetings. Which artists, labels or collaborators are you hoping to cross paths with in Las Palmas?
There are festivals that I love because of their eclecticism and how they don’t care about Genre but rather about energy. THIS! This is so important for music, for culture and for human connection! I know the festival scene is going through challenging times for several reasons, specially the way kids discover and connect with music is changing… so I don’t blame festivals having to make tough decisions, and including upcoming acts in that equation is a challenge. But I also hope to see a future of festival/event curation where instead of falling for the extremes of either “play safe and book what the listener wants” or “I just book what I like”, promoters and bookers truly put an effort into understanding TikTok and new audiences and how these two are reprogramming people’s way to connect with culture. If you understand something you can hack it for your purpose, kinda, you know? It would be so sad if the curator’s experience of music and culture became isolated from the new generations. I do my job as an artist on social media, but curators, bookers and promoters who also understand this and actively work to stay up-to-date are definitely people I want to meet.
Your live shows are as much performance and ritual as concert. How does a room of delegates change how you bring that energy?
That’s a great question… I don’t think I want to change absolutely anything about my show.
Gran Canaria sits at a mid-Atlantic crossroads between Africa, Europe and the Americas — exactly the between-worlds space you describe as a Latina in Germany. Does a place like that speak to your work?
So much! And it makes me interested at a human level before anything, it’s an area I have yet to explore and it’s so exciting to perform in a place where there are so many ancient traces of you… of our constant migrations and cultural exchanges as humans which remind one another: this is what makes us pretty awesome as a humanity.
If you could write a personal invitation to the people of Las Palmas to come and discover your showcase, what would it say?
Have you heard about this girl from Venezuela? Some of her songs are catchy like Shakira but she’s a bit weirder.
Gotopo plays WOMEX 26's Club Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
21–25 October, at the Auditorio Alfredo Kraus
PLAYLIST: GOTOPO X RHYTHM PASSPORT
You can find all the previous episodes of Musical Road to Womex HERE