Paola Navone’s Nomadic Table

Edited by Cintya Concari & Roberto Marcatti
Curators

Imperfect, deconstructed, convivial, multicultural, artisanal, yet at the same time joyful, cheerful, and ironic.
Paola Navone, a versatile architect and designer, presents 8 nomadic tables. This year, she will be the star of the cultural exhibition at the 26th edition of Mercatino del Gusto, once again dedicated to narrating the culture of food and design.
Thanks to this recurring initiative shared with the Mercatino del Gusto Association, the Presidency of the Puglia Regional Council, and the Puglia Library and Museum Hub—a collaboration renewed annually to address the theme of ‘food and design’ so present in everyday life—the exhibition is hosted for the fourth consecutive year in the institutional spaces of the Civic Museum of Paleontology and Palethnology in Maglie. It tells visitors about the close link between the evolution of ancient sociality described within and the habits of our contemporary living.
Eight exhibition areas, each synthesizing concepts of functionality and memory while amplifying conviviality and social relations, allowing Paola Navone – Otto Studio – to express her creative mark on different stylistic languages and user needs. The sequence of tables shows her ability to adapt to personal aesthetic codes that recall the different places in the world she has explored and drawn inspiration from, thanks to her versatile and dynamic design approach.
And let’s not forget that eight is a special, ‘magic’ number. It’s the atomic number of oxygen, the element that makes life possible. There are eight planets in our solar system, and eight directions on the compass rose. Not for nothing, its graphic symbol, rotated 90 degrees, becomes the infinity symbol—a number we like to think of as an opportunity for encounter and cultural dialogue between East and West, expressed through a shared culture of food and design.
The Blue and Blue area, the Painting Atelier area, the Pop area, the Metal Baroque area, the White Shape area, the Fish area, the Folk area, and finally the Picnic area