Valentina Montalvo came up in Santiago's precarious, genre-blending scene. Today she's one of the Chilean artists most present on Europe's most demanding stages.
In August 2025 DJ Mag added her to its Recognise series; in January 2026 she played Berghain as part of Berlin's CTM Festival. Valesuchi —Valentina Montalvo, raised in Santiago— makes the journey that's rarely told: from the Chilean underground to the center of global techno.
From Blondie to the world
Valesuchi learned to mix in Santiago's DIY underground, that scene that crosses genres without prejudice and which she associates with places like the queer club Blondie. Out of it came an artistic identity that now circulates through the planet's most serious circuit. In 2025 she released her second album, Futuro Cercano —eleven tracks issued by a Colombian label— and returned to Santiago to throw the launch party, a gesture that says a lot about where her root still lies.
The stages that matter
International recognition accelerated. DJ Mag included her in Recognise, its mix series for weighty emerging artists, in August 2025; and CTM Festival selected her to play Berghain in late January 2026. Her recent run includes Panorama Bar, Tresor, De School, Primavera Sound and Montreal's MUTEK. In the booth she's associated with her b2b sets with Chilean DJ Diegors, whom she calls "the Chilean Larry Levan," a way of insisting the genealogy that shaped her is local.
"The word 'career' irritates me." —Valesuchi, to DJ Mag
Exporting upward from precarity
That line isn't a pose. Valesuchi says it to distance herself from the idol-worship and big-business logic that dominates contemporary dance music. And there's an uncomfortable coherence between that stance and her biography: venacava, the DIY party she ran in Rio from 2022, ended up closing under financial pressure. The same scene that exports talent can't always sustain the structures that produce it.
There's the pattern Valesuchi embodies without meaning to. The Chilean scene —like much of the South— works like a quarry: it forms artists in precarious conditions and watches them shine abroad, in rooms its own circuit couldn't afford. The road to legitimacy still runs through Berlin, and that leaves a question bigger than one DJ: what does it mean for a scene to produce more value than it manages to keep, and who pockets the difference when the talent it raised ends up paying off in another economy.
Valesuchi reached Berghain without ever dropping Santiago's name; her career —that word that irritates her— is also a reminder of all the South exports and doesn't keep.