Daniel Rozensztroch on Curating “Take It or Leave It” | The Slowdown - Culture, Nature, Future
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Daniel Rozensztroch at the “Take It or Leave It” exhibition. (Photo: Antonio Campanella)
Daniel Rozensztroch at the “Take It or Leave It” exhibition. (Photo: Antonio Campanella)

Daniel Rozensztroch has a rare knack for subtly telling stories through objects. The world of the Paris- and Nice-based stylist and former artistic director of the French boutique concept store Merci, widely known under Rozensztroch’s direction for its expertly edited selection of wares, brims with visual and material culture. From a young age, he began collecting items—perhaps most notably, spoons—and has published several books on his acquisitions over the years.

When, in New York in the 1980s, Rozensztroch met the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone—who has similarly been on an endless, self-described “treasure hunt” for intriguing items her whole life—there was an instant connection. “We fell in love,” Rozensztroch says. “That was the beginning of a very strong relationship.” Since then, the two have embarked on a number of projects together, both personal and professional, and traveled the world—everywhere from the Philippines to the United States to Morocco—to indulge in their shared passion of exploring flea markets and bazaars. Their professional collaborations range from developing an exhibition for the Parisian department store Printemps to conceptualizing the eccentric 25hours Hotel in Florence.

For their latest collaboration, the Milan Design Week exhibition “Take It or Leave It”—organized with The Slowdown and presenting an eclectic assortment of 1,000 numbered items collected or designed by Navone, which are being given away through a free, by-reservation, in-person lottery—Rozensztroch served as the curator. In the weeks leading up to the exhibition, he and Navone went through boxes upon boxes of things she had been keeping for years in storage. With his refined eye and instinctual approach, Rozensztroch then identified the most compelling pieces for inclusion. The result is a joyful display, with objects in a wide assortment of shapes and sizes, each a reflection of Navone’s adventurous attitude.

On the opening day of the exhibition this past Monday, Rozensztroch floated around the space, visibly overjoyed to see the lottery winners each with their respective spoils. Every so often, he would slip into the exhibition room, shifting objects by a centimeter here or an inch there, recalibrating certain items as others were removed. His glee was palpable.

During the cocktail party that evening, I stole Rozensztroch away for a few minutes to discuss the process and backstory behind the exhibition. It was the perfect setting: just us in the quiet exhibition space, looking out on the hundreds of objects he had so carefully arranged, sipping on grapefruit gin and tonics with a low hum of voices and clinking glasses leaking in through the doorway. During that brief, extraordinary interval, we spoke about everything from his decades-long relationship with Navone to his upcoming book chronicling his collection of sailor-themed ephemera.

Here, a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

View of the “Take It or Leave It” exhibition. (Photo: Antonio Campanella)
View of the “Take It or Leave It” exhibition. (Photo: Antonio Campanella)

How did you and Paola meet? Tell me about your relationship.

That’s a long, long, long story that started in the 1980s in New York. We have a friend that we love, Suzy Slesin, in New York, and I met Paola [through her]. She was working at that time for Knoll International. And I was in New York—I don’t remember for what reason, but I came from California to New York. And Paola asked me, “Do you know New York?” I said, “Of course, I know New York quite well,” and she said, “Okay, tomorrow, we have to do a tour together.” And we fell in love. That was the beginning of a very strong relationship. After that, we traveled a lot together. Sometimes we work together on beautiful projects, like when she worked in the Philippines, and we also did a huge exhibition in a department store in Paris, Printemps.

This is when you were at Merci?

No, Merci was many years after. I started with Merci in 2008. I was the artistic director there, and Paola and I did many collaborations together. We did an exhibition with Richard Ginori, and Paola did a fantastic exhibition for Merci. After that, we also did a collaboration with the ceramics company Fasano. We also worked on the 25hours Hotel in Firenze. Then she asked me to be the curator of this exhibition.

What did you think of the concept of “Take It or Leave It” when Paola first proposed it to you?

The last years of my collaboration with Merci, I was thinking of a new kind of relationship with consumers, and that was before the pandemic. For me, the thinking behind “Take It or Leave It” is very important, because it’s Paola’s story, but it’s not only Paola’s—it’s also a change of the mentality of the consumers. We are paying much more attention to: “I need it, I don’t need it.” “It’s important, it’s not important.” “I have it, or I don’t have it.” And all of these things completely change our attitude [about] buying things. That’s something that we really have to think about, and it’s the beginning of something that will grow in the future.

Tell me about the process of putting this exhibition together with Paola, and about your role in the project.

I cleaned … [Laughs] ... thousands of objects that Paola has collected for so many years. All these objects were in very bad condition, in storage somewhere in Milan. The first job was to open the boxes, to see what was inside, and to start to make a selection. Some were dirty, some were broken, some were without interest. We [arranged] them by colors, by style, and by themes. And little by little, something started to happen—the construction and the vision of these objects became very interesting, week by week. That was the beginning of the work. Of course, after that, we had to think about the concept and the idea of all these items that Paola decided to leave. The exhibition is “Take It or Leave it,” and Paola is the first to leave all these objects.

It is really a reflection of the fact that we [have been] addicted collectors, Paola and me, for so many years. Little by little, we have so many things at home, in storage, in closets, at Paola’s houses in Milan and around Italy—France for me—and all of these objects we loved. We bought them because they were interesting, they were nice, they were a source of inspiration in our work, but now it’s so many things that we cannot respirer (breathe). We had to decide to do something about that.

The decision came from Spencer [Bailey, The Slowdown’s editor-in-chief]. It’s interesting, because it’s something that has to do with a new kind of consumer, and the way that they’re buying things.

Rozensztroch at the “Take It or Leave It” exhibition. (Photo: Antonio Campanella)
Rozensztroch at the “Take It or Leave It” exhibition. (Photo: Antonio Campanella)

What was it like to go through her storage and archive? How did you go about selecting the items in the exhibition?

Oh, it was funny. First of all, it was a kind of discovering things. I was like a child in a big store, opening boxes and discovering extraordinary things. Many of these things I remembered, because I traveled a lot with Paola and I was with her when she bought them, and they reminded me of a market, a bazaar, or an antique store somewhere in the world. That was fantastic. I had forgotten about them, of course, because it has been so many years since we first discovered them. It was a very emotional process.

I love to do this kind of selection, too. It’s a kind of synthesis. When you put one object, okay, you don’t know exactly if you like it. But when we mixed it with something [that created a] shock of culture, or with something similar, it became more and more interesting. That’s the story of a collection. When you have ten pieces, or one hundred pieces, it becomes very strong, very interesting.

We arranged them by the colors, the textures, by use, all of these things. It’s a construction. You make a story. It’s like when you are a writer, words, together, make a sentence.

How did you go about organizing the objects in this particular way?

It was a big job, I have to say, but easy. Because, as I told you, the objects speak together—one object speaks with another object. When you put them together, you make a story. It’s white; it’s blue. It’s ceramics; it’s glass. Sometimes people ask me how I work, and it’s very difficult for me to explain that, because it’s something that I did very fast. I had an [instinct] of how to put the things together.

You previously organized a Milan Design Week exhibition with Merci in this same space. How does this project compare to that one?

For the display, it was the same thing. But the objects were very different. The difference here is that I love this eclectic selection of objects; they are all different. They came from all over the world. They came from different carriers. They came from different savoir faires. Merci was much more of a store, and this is more like a bazaar. And I love bazaars. When I’m traveling, the first place where I want to go is the market, the bazaar, the flea market, all of these places, because it’s there that you can find one object in the middle of nothing. That’s something that gives me such a strong pleasure, a kind of adrenaline.

Like a diamond in the rough.

Exactly. Fantastique!

You mentioned you’ve traveled the world with Paola. Can you tell a story about an object that you found here that you discovered while traveling with her?

I remember, in the Philippines, we had this extraordinary opportunity to buy everything we wanted, especially antiques. We had cash, we paid, and we put the things in storage, and at the end, we sent it to Paris. It was so fun to do that together. To travel and to discover those things, when you are alone, it’s okay. But when you are with somebody with the same taste and same kind of immersion, that’s fantastic.

What, to you, is so defining about Paola and her work?

Paola is really unique, and that’s something that I knew from the beginning. She feels completely free to do everything she wants. She knows exactly what she hates, and she has no limit. Everything she does is so funny, with emotion, with culture—with culture, that’s something very important, all of these sources of inspiration that come from around the world. She’s unique in that way, especially in Italy. Italian design was so formal for so many years. She stopped walking in that direction a long time ago.

What’s next? Are you working on anything exciting right now?

I’m doing a book on a big collection of sailor-themed objects that I’ve collected for many, many years. It’s a collection that, until now, I refused to show, because I did a lot of books on my everyday objects that everybody knows now, but this collection is much more intimate. I was not really ready to show that, but my editor in New York convinced me to do it. Now I’m very happy, because the book will be very beautiful. This book is on collecting objects on sailors, but starts with children’s toys and finishes with very erotic pictures. It’s a kind of panorama.

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Consider the flower. What image blossoms to mind? What emotion does it elicit? For centuries, flowers have persisted as Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography (Thames & Hudson), out August 30, editors William Ewing and Danaé Panchaud compose a selection of vibrant modern floral

The Wind and Water Bar mid-construction. (Photo: Phan Quang. Courtesy Thames & Hudson.)

Lush fruit trees bursting over a roof. A canopy of plants covering a facade. Intricate bamboo constructions spiraling frVõ Trọng Nghĩa: Building Nature (Thames & Hudson), readers get an inside look into how the celebrated architect has embraced two core themes throughout

David Wallace-Wells. (Photo: Andrew Zuckerman / The Slowdown)

The climate writer and essayist David Wallace-Wells has a knack for translating the unimaginable into the painfully realarticle for New York magazine and subsequent book of the same name, The Uninhabitable Earth, played a critical role in jolting the conversation, detailing the varied plagues and, finally, apocalyptic conditions The New York Times, who added him to their Opinion section, where he has begun a weekly newsletter to reflect on the latest in our Anthropocene Age.

The Future Library Forest. (Photo: Rio Gandara. Courtesy Helsingin Sanomat)

“A forest in Norway is growing.” So begins the cryptic text printed on a certificate for the Future Library, or Framtidsbiblioteket, an artwork by Scottish artist Katie Paterson that, over the span of a century, cumulatively builds a collection of wri

Sound installation by Devon Turnbull. (Courtesy Lisson Gallery)

At New York’s Lisson Gallery, an unfettered approach to sculpture is the driving force behind a new group exhibition. OnThe Odds Are Good, The Goods Are Odd” presents the work of 11 groundbreaking New York City–based contemporary artists. In the exhibition, sculptures are a m

“Windy” spins on New York’s High Line. (Courtesy Meriem Bennani, High Line Art, and Audemars Piguet)

Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirliWindy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewilderi

Baratunde Thurston at the Badwater Basin in California’s Death Valley National Park. (Courtesy Twin Cities PBS/Part2 Pictures)

“We think we invent things and create things and define ourselves by ourselves, but that’s not the whole story,” BaratunAmerica Outdoors, a six-part travel series that premiered last week on PBS. Thurston—a writer, comedian, and podcaster who has advised tThe Daily Show, and authored the best-selling memoir How To Be Black—has a knack for navigating nuanced conversations around race, culture, politics, and technology, framing these discussi

Cover of “Rocky Mountain Modern” by John Gendall

The jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains is too beautiful to mar. Yet over the years, developers and builders have manageBuckminster Fuller, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eliot Noyes, and Eero Saarinen completed commissions in the Western United States, transforming it into a hub for architectural modRocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes (Monacelli Press).

Alexandra Lange. (Photo: Mark Wickens)

A recurring theme in design critic Alexandra Lange’s work is unpacking how—and for whom—objects and spaces are designed.The Dot-Com City, and surveyed how kids’ toys and physical environments impact their development in her 2018 book, The Design of Childhood. The ways in which outdoor public spaces, with their basketball courts, playgrounds, and skate parks, fail teen girls wa story she wrote for Bloomberg CityLab—one of many publications she has contributed to over the past two-plus decades.

A still from Kandis Williams’s multiscreen work “Triadic Ballet” (2021). (Courtesy the artist and the Rosenkranz Collection.)

Time standards are one of the many seemingly invisible societal constructs we interact with every day but seldom ponder.Mountain / Time,” the show is a nod to both the local time zone in Aspen, Mountain Standard Time (MST)—which the writer and critic Kylehas hailed for its “apartness” and “sense of detachment from the economic and cultural centers of the nation”—and the conceptual d

Installation view of the “Hermès in the Making” exhibition in Troy, Michigan. (Photo: William Jess Laird)

Detroit is a city of craft. Of carmakers and Carhartt. Of Motown Records and Eminem. Of iconic midcentury design (Isamu Noguchi’s Hart Plaza and Dodge Fountain, buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Minoru Heidelberg Project. So it’s fitting that, following previous iterations in Copenhagen, last fall, and in Turin, Italy, last month, the Freits latest “Hermès in the Making” exhibition (through June 15). A playful, Willy Wonka factory–like presentation of the company’s know-how, the display offers “an o not to smile while walking through it. Divided into four sections—”A Culture of Traditional Craftsmanship,” “High-Quality Msecret!” Beyond, stations feature artisans in saddle-stitching, porcelain painting, gemstone setting, glove-making, leather wor

Photo: Carlo Banfi. (Courtesy Flos)

Emerging from the pandemic, the design industry, like most of us, has changed. The past two and a half years, which havean increasingly pressing climate crisis, have formed a solemn backdrop. In March 2020, almost at once, in the locked-down lives of many, the notion of “home” a

Maria Cristina Didero. (Photo: Stefan Giftthaler)

The concept of the Golden Age was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, around 700 B.C., in a refereDesign Miami Basel (June 14–19), taking place at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz. Organized around the theme “The Golden Age: Rooted in the Pa

Cover of “The Trayvon Generation” by Elizabeth Alexander

How do the generation of Black Americans who grew up in the past 25 years reckon with the tragedies that play out in theThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing), poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander—who currently serves as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the UnEp. 52 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—explores these questions, and others, by meditating on race, class, trauma, justice, and memory, and their influences

Installation view of “Plastic: Remaking Our World.” (Photo: Bettina Matthiessen)

In the early 1860s, an advertisement in The New York Times offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. At the time, elephant ivory was the matercamphor, a waxy substance found in the wood of the camphor laurel tree. Though celluloid would later prove to be less than idea

Rendering of Drift’s indoor drone performance, “Social Sacrifice” (2022). (Courtesy Drift and Aorist)

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital assets created using blockchain technology), have divided the art woEp. 59 of our Time Sensitive podcast), see them as pathways to a promising future, while others express concern around the sky-high price points and carbon emissions they generate.

“Between the Mountain and the Sky” by Maggie Doyne

At 35, Maggie Doyne is the mother of more than 50 children. One is her biological child, who lives with Doyne, her husbaBetween the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Love (Harper Horizon), out last month. Through telling her extraordinary story, she demonstrates the life-altering power of

A ramen bowl by Taku Satoh. (Photo: Hiroshi Tsujitani. Courtesy Nacasa & Partners Inc.)

Eating ramen is a multisensory experience: the fragrant steam coming off of the broth, the slurping sound of enjoying thThe Art of the Ramen Bowl” (March 18–July 5) that’s on view at the Los Angeles location of Japan House, an initiative with additional hubs in Londonburi, the porcelain receptacles in which ramen is traditionally served, and renge, the compact, teardrop-shaped spoons that often accompany them, made by 30 leading artists, architects, and designers.

Anicka Yi’s “Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)” (2022), on view at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. (Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca.)

Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their sEp. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter an

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch helps people develop their versions of a healthy life—a potentially daunting tasDoing Well, Javitch, a former womenswear consultant at Theory and Uniqlo, offers private health and career coaching as well as groEp. 46 of our At a Distance podcast.)

Installation view of “David Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic.” (Courtesy Pace Gallery)

Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to itwomen, grandpas, and singers craning toward the ceiling, and donuts, hairs, and holes reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, thiDavid Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic” (on view Feb. 2–March 19), a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.

Skyscraper Page website

With their audacious, gravity-defying forms, skyscrapers have captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.Skyscraper Page, a zany website with a skyscraper discussion forum that has spread to some 100,000 threads. But what’s the point of obs