"I like to live exciting experiences and I enjoy testing myself. Also, I am the mother of a chaotic and fun large family and, sometimes, even though I have a job with responsibility and three children, I still find it hard to feel like an adult." Leaning against the bar, Patrícia Martínez del Hoyo sips a drink from her freshly served beer and picks at an olive. In her gaze, a sparkle full of curiosity and appetite for new stimuli. Outside, dusk falls, and the Bar livens up.
Screenwriter, creative, actress and occasional playwright, restless and, like a good young soul, constantly looking for new games to play, Pat ---"which is what everyone calls me except my twin sister, who still calls me Patrícia"--- leads EVA, the channel aimed at 3Cat's Generation Z.
As if this wasn't keeping her busy enough, she has also just debuted with her first novel, Ens hem perdut (La Campana). A travel story, emotional, narrated with a road movie tone, of young people in search of meaning: that of life, that of love, that of their place in a complex and large world where a song can change the course of your existence. Dangerous, but beautiful. "Now I'm in the full promotion phase of the book ---she adds---, and it's certainly a very fun and less solitary part than writing!", she laughs.
--- And do you have time for everything now?
Without losing her smile, the patron affirms. It doesn't end there. "Since I'm very interested in humor, I'm also currently training in stand up comedy at La Llama School." She takes a couple of seconds to sip another drink, eat a couple of olives and resumes speaking: "Honestly, I don't know exactly why I'm doing it, but I'm loving the process!" A new game. A new maneuver to avoid the gray and not surrender to the stagnation of adulthood.
When changes pluralize life
Born in a small town in the Pyrenees, Patrícia Martínez del Hoyo can say that she has lived several lives in one, driven, multiplied by constant change. "I spent a childhood moving from place to place. Because of my father's job, we changed houses, towns and schools a thousand times. Yes, changes have been a constant for me."
Until her university stage arrived, at the Faculty of Humanities, she didn't start living as she liked. And she got a taste for it. Her first job was as an actress in La Fura dels Baus, with whom she went on tours all over the world. She directed a short film, Cerdos, piñas y otros mortales (Pigs, Pineapples and Other Mortals), with which she went to the prestigious Sundance festival. She specialized in narrative and transmedia transformation and was deputy director of La comunitat on TV3 and presenter of Efecte wow on Club Súper 3, in addition to acting in the series Això no és Suècia (This is not Sweden).
That, changes that turn one life into many, that pluralize it, like "the short, but intense, period when we lived in San Francisco with my partner, or when I was director of a decoration magazine and felt out of place," she explains about El Mueble which, under her baton, completed an ambitious digitalization process.
Of course, lives are more than their numerous professional stages: "Motherhood and, more recently, my daughter's hospitalization after an accident, are also moments from which I have learned a lot."
--- The accident must have been very hard.
-- Yes, but I believe that, although sometimes they are not pleasant, all experiences teach you things.
City with Gràcia
Fond of wandering through Barcelona in search of corners, landscapes and people that she falls in love with, the writer assures that she has been exploring it, "in search of its neighborhoods, its bars and its dens," since she was 16: "I like to walk with my children, go down Verdi street and go to a bookstore or see an exhibition. I love theater, Sala Beckett is my favorite theater and, if I don't feel like leaving the neighborhood, going to Heliogàbal is the perfect plan for a silly night. One of those that you know how they start, but not how they end."
Settled in Gràcia since she was 24, she feels this neighborhood, "which is like a village," as her home. A space of her own faces and corners, to the point that they are reflected in her book, "where what happens is all fiction, but the places I describe are all real."
Gràcia is, for her, a home she likes to show and boast about. "When someone from outside comes, I usually design the route, I like to recommend places." And she remembers that time, "when we became, along with one of my best friends who is a Japanese interpreter, guides for some Japanese people who came to the city. We offered to accompany them so they could discover the most authentic places in Barcelona, eating snails and ending up in some bar with the shutter down, to which they wouldn't know how to return without our help." And she sighs, smiling.
--- You can't leave this Bar without having tried our gastronomic offer. We have a menu, portions, tapas, combined dishes... You won't want to leave here even when we close the shutter, you'll see.
Patrícia Martínez del Hoyo laughs heartily. Dinner time has arrived and she, a night owl, becomes active under the mantle of the already dark sky. This could end up being one of those evenings where you don't know when or how they end.
--- I think I'll try some portions ---she decides, while calling her partner to join her with their children.