Born in Argentina, Paula Martini He spent half his life in Uruguay. But in her, there is nothing of broken hearts. As she says, the Río de la Plata is her spine and her lungs breathe in unison that south-east that embraces both shores. The lion-colored fresh water of the port of Quinquela mutates, slowly dyeing like its yarns, in the blue salt of the Atlantic Sea when it opens on the coasts of Jose Ignacio, without having lost the Buenos Aires accent and strangely without having incorporated, therefore less in the conversation with fellow countrymen, the charrúa idioms. 25 years ago, “Bajo el Alma” was born, her clothing brand with infinite silhouettes made of natural fibers molded by the wind and waves and hand-dyed in pots as if frozen in time. Unique, after a stint at Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Parsons in New York and Saint Martins in London, almost simultaneously with the love project with Martin Pittaluga (65) one of the owners of the legendary La Huella restaurant and one of the visionaries of José Ignacio, the fishing town that saw it grow and that today has international fame. “A town that I adore and that is basically manic depressive because it has three minutes of fame and the rest of the year he lives only with the dogs and the wind,” she notes, smilingly removing any luster that those who seek to scale it with the international luxury resorts want to give it. Like everything in her life, and in her art, Paula likes to continue flying low, so as not to lose the habit of having that intimate and loving perspective that the closeness of things gives you.
News: What was Paula like who arrived for the first time in Punta del Este?
Paula Martini: I was always very dedicated to manual work. My parents were separated, so wherever I had to be, whether with my father or my mother, I was always accompanied by my manual chores. I came to Uruguay for the first time because of my second father. At that time we spent summers in a house in the San Rafael forest. She was a rather naive girl with a traditional upper-middle class upbringing without much fanfare, the typical Buenos Aires vacationer from Punta del Este.
News: But later in the nineties came the adventure of José Ignacio…
Martini: It was January 1995, I was 22 years old and I was sad because a boyfriend had just left me, and a friend much livelier than me was hired to cook at El Galpón, a crazy nighttime restaurant run by Martín Pittaluga and Arnaud Le Forrestier. It was on the wild beach of José Ignacio, next to what is now La Huella, and I joined her project without any type of talent or ability, so I landed on the adventure and it was worth it. Jose Ignacio was fairly unknown, a place with his projects and many people who came to do their thing. The experience of serving another person was interesting. Something beautiful in my life, apart from the adventure, impacted me with the experience of knowing other views on life, other thoughts, other ways of living. Without forgetting that in that long and beautiful summer I also met Martín (Pittaluga), my current husband!
News: But he didn’t stay?
Martini: No, I became obedient to continue at the National School of Fine Arts, and he came back. Each one followed their projects and different activities, until we got married, and then we returned to José Ignacio and there we combined our chores and put together a project in our house. The first restaurant together.
News: He returned to the place where it all began, to begin another new page of his story
Martini: Martín already had a career path, he has worked in gastronomy since he was 15 and he has been working in hospitality for 50 years. I always followed textiles, but when I met him in Jose Ignacio it was quite organic that our project was to go live there.
News: And “Under the soul” is born.
Martini: From the first minute “Bajo el alma” was our home. There I always had my own space that was my workshop. He had all winter to work and in the summer he turned it into a shop attached to the restaurant, and while he was tending it he went back and forth. He accompanies me to get things that I need and I support him in his projects.
News: For years she lived with the success of La Huella, her husband’s restaurant, which in terms of demand must have been intense.
Martini: It was a shock! At first I felt like she was suffering from Stockholm syndrome: she was in love with my kidnapper. I stayed in José Ignacio with a divine story called “Bajo el alma”, but after a few years I stayed here trapped between Martin’s projects. The move from “Bajo el alma” to La Huella was strong, because it broke a bit of what was a couple’s personal project, the game was opened. We started independent projects, each one went off to do their own thing, and that added and subtracted. He added, because having more projects allows you to stay in the place where you wanted to stay, and he subtracted, because La Huella demanded the physical presence of my partner. He sucked up all of Martín’s time, and that made my time not so much my own. My fight was not against La Huella itself, but against the time that Martín dedicated to La Huella, which was time that he stole my children from me.
News: A year ago you moved to Buenos Aires, was it for your children? (Lorenzo, 16 and León, 9)
Martini: I’m lying to you if I tell you that it was because of them, because deep down it was because of us. In part, it is true that we thought it was a good idea for them to grow up with the perception that the scale of life is not so small. They were going to learn it anyway, but it seemed interesting to me that a person as curious and interested in geopolitics as Lorenzo could escape from a world where the bus driver took him for a walk around the square to blow out the candles on his birthday, something which is divine, but I thought it was interesting that he knew a city scale. But the real reason we decided to spend time in the city was because of the need we had to stop repeating ourselves. We felt like we were a little bit automated in certain things and we wanted to have a chance to break that.
News: What did Uruguay teach you?
Martini: He taught me to go down twenty gears, to try to speak in a language that the other would understand me. When I moved, I had to adjust a lot of lenses to re-understand new beauties, values, times. Everyone around me has been amazing masters of pausing.. I am strident, motivated, a person full of strength that sometimes exceeds me, and I also liked being able to intersperse a bit of other perspectives, to have a bit of feedback from creative people from people who do other things. When you live isolated, because I lived isolated these 20 years, it is not the same as when you are surrounded by another scale of another engine.
News: In these 25 years he was carrying out an apostolate of craftsmanship, of hand-dying, something that today is revalued as a luxury but then had to be sustained.
Martini: From the beginning I was uncompromising with the materials I chose to work with. They were always fibers of natural origin. That was a huge, deep and unwavering commitment.. After that there are hands, which do certain things that arise here and there, and then you think about what to do, and that is the easiest, the most fun. It is a dialogue that you weave with yourself.
News: Your husband says that in two years he will leave La Huella, and you have just celebrated your 25th birthday and are expanding to Buenos Aires, opposite poles?
Martini: They are the cycles of life. You are moving forward. It matters to me that what I do continues to motivate me and I make sure that all of this is the case. I am 50 years old and this comes at a time when I have security, I am more grounded and I don’t have to justify what I do. And if Martín wants to step aside from his work in two years, I hope I am at his side to be able to support what he supported for so long, because if there is something that I could do, it was work knowing that in the first years There was someone who had my back. I hope it’s a wheel!
News: Would you sell to a big brand?
Martini: Never on a large scale. My goal is to continue liking what I do. Sometimes the economy forces you to grow a little so that everything remains stable. Many brands regret scaling because it kills their spirit of doing, the motivation of their work., you don’t get it by magic, and if you’re not motivated, you’re in a mess. I don’t want anything to kill me what I sustained with enormous effort against hurricane winds.
News: After the celebration, where do you see yourself in five years?
Martini: I realized I was 25 at the end of the year. It made me happy to realize that we had endured a lot of moments that were difficult and we got out. I celebrated knowing that I continue doing something I like to do and I plan to do the same. In the movie “The Taste of Things,” Juliette Binoche says: “Happiness lies in continuing to love what you have,” and I grabbed that phrase.
