Take My Indian Aluminum Spoons. Please!

This article is part of our Design special report previewing 2023 Milan Design Week.

Instead of peddling a new vessel or pouf during Salone del Mobile in Milan this year, Paola Navone is spending the design week giving her objects away for free. The 73-year-old architect and designer, a former member of the avant-garde Studio Alchimia, dreamed up an exhibition featuring pieces she created or collected over the past five decades, including rare prototypes and artisanal antiques.

The show will be a retrospective of the designer’s globally informed inspirations and tastes, but with the added twist that at the end of its run, from Monday through April 21, every object might have a new owner. Members of the public who enter the exhibition’s lottery will be randomly paired with an object, and as instructed by the show’s title, “Take It or Leave It,” will have the option to accept or decline it at no cost.

“I think probably most will take the object. Why not?” predicted Ms. Navone, who is hosting the exhibition at her Zona Tortona studio.

Consistent with her reputation for eclecticism, the show’s hundreds of objects range in origin and period, spanning both high design and vernacular craft, many of the pieces acquired at flea markets and bazaars throughout Africa, Asia and Europe.

Among her souvenirs is an earthenware amulet, a four-tier embossed-aluminum lunch box, and a fish-shaped ceramic vodka serving set.

“I just pick what has value for me in the moment,” the globe-trotting Ms. Navone said. “I don’t mean commercial value, but the value or importance to my system of thinking or to a project I’m working on.” (The designer conveyed this message in a video call, wearing turquoise sunglasses, with an abundance of pillows of a similar shade in the background.)

“My favorites in the exhibition are these Alessi trays that Paola designed with laminate-patterned bottoms by Abet,” said Spencer Bailey, the editor in chief of The Slowdown, the media platform that is a partner in “Take It or Leave It.” (Participants have to sign up for its new membership subscription program to enter the giveaway.) “Abet is famous for their laminates for the Memphis Group,” Mr. Bailey said about the postmodern Italian design movement that has enjoyed a 21st-century revival.

The trays, however, which are prototypes, were never put into production by Alessi. The design company, according to Ms. Navone, was at the time resistant to using materials other than metal. “I tried to tell them, designing for the house, we can use some color, add some materials that are less cold, but not everybody was convinced,” she recalled with a shrug. “I tried to make an experiment. That’s my approach.”

Mr. Bailey said he has been in awe of Ms. Navone ever since she refused to hire a caterer for an industry dinner to introduce a tableware collection she designed for Crate & Barrel and instead cooked a multicourse Italian meal herself for the 50 or so guests. “She last-minute snuck in fresh ricotta from Italy,” Mr. Bailey recalled about the evening a decade ago. “I still remember eating that.”

A year later, in 2014, when he was the editor in chief of Surface magazine, Mr. Bailey put Ms. Navone on the cover. “I liked this young boy, asking good questions and not stupidly, so we became friends,” Ms. Navone said. In October, she floated to Mr. Bailey the idea of getting rid of her stuff. “I have to start making empty space around me, so I can again think about new fresh ideas,” she said. (When asked about Marie Kondo, Ms. Navone said she’d never heard of her.)

Daniel Rozensztroch, a longtime friend of Ms. Navone’s who acted as the exhibition’s curator, was supportive of her drive to jettison. “As designers and stylists, we have to collect to discover sources of inspiration, but sometimes we have to be less addicted,” he said.

Mr. Rozensztroch was for many years the artistic director of the famed Paris concept shop Merci and often accompanied Ms. Navone on her buying trips around the world. And while many of the objects he sorted through were familiar, there were also some revelations.

“I discovered she had an extraordinary collection of Indian aluminum spoons,” he said. Mr. Rozensztroch published an entire book, called “Spoon,” based on his own 2,000-piece collection. “These pieces made me very jealous!”

Ms. Navone is no stranger to creating buzz at Design Week. One of the most talked-about installations recently was a pop-up cafe built around her 2009 collaboration with the porcelain company Richard Ginori, which gave meals away for free.

At the heart of this year’s giveaway, however, is a challenge to what Mr. Bailey described as “our culture’s consumerist catastrophe.” How successful the exhibition will be at generating conversations about sustainability and slimmed-down production remains to be seen.

In the end, Ms. Navone didn’t quite get the blank slate she dreamed of: “There’s less stuff in my office, and the warehouse is better, but we are far away from the empty space I imagined as the real output of all this,” she said. “But, you know, in life you always have to compromise.”