Once in a lifetime, every person comes across a sweet relationship. It is pleasant till the time they are together. However, the same turns into bitterness when the relationship ends. The gifts exchanged during that duration are cherished by some and regretted by others.
One World News has found a place where you can store your gifts and share your memories & experiences with others. Popularly referred to as the ‘Museum of Broken Relationships’, let’s take a deeper look at it
How did you come up with such a unique idea?
The museum’s concept is actually a brainchild of two persons, Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic, whose own emotional puzzlements during their break-up finally became an inspiration for realizing this art project. Their main motivational question was – What to do with all those tokens of love that we gather during relationships? Wouldn’t it be great if there is a special place where we can leave them knowing that the object continues its existence independently?
They shared their thoughts with their friends and it turned out that everyone they talked to reacted very enthusiastically about the concept. So, their idea came into existence in 2006 when it was first presented as a small temporary art installation in a boat container on a street in Zagreb (Croatia). Several dozens of trivial objects, accompanied by a personal story, formed a display with an intention to create a space of ‘secure memory’ or ‘protected remembrance’ in order to preserve the material and non-material heritage of broken relationships.
Give a description of some things that people have donated to the museum.
Starting out we were afraid that we would get a pile of letters and stuffed toys, but we are still amazed by the diversity of objects and stories that we have collected so far. Some objects, as can be expected, come in greater numbers and these for the most part relate to weddings, for example wedding albums, dresses, rings etc. But on the whole, the collection proudly boasts objects as random as a bicycle, an axe, an ID card, a prosthetic leg and many others. Since the donations are accompanied by intimate confessions, stories which are not fiction but a segment of the donator’s personal history, we try to exhibit them with maximum respect for the emotional heritage they carry. The appeal of the exhibition rests on the fact that every visitor, depending on their own life experience, gets a unique sense of the stories told. Every person will come across something familiar and something equally surprising. Everyone has their favourite.
However, we can provide a few random objects and their stories from our current permanent display in Zagreb.
An ex-axe
1995 Berlin, Germany
She was the first woman that I let move in with me. All my friends thought I needed to learn to let people in more. A few months after she moved in, I was offered to travel to the US. She could not come along. At the airport we said goodbye in tears, and she was assuring me she could not survive three weeks without me. I returned after three weeks, and she said: “I’ve fallen in love with someone else. I have known her for just four days, but I know she can give me everything that you cannot.”
I returned after three weeks, and she said: “I’ve fallen in love with someone else. I have known her for just four days, but I know she can give me everything that you cannot.”
I was banal and asked about her plans regarding our life together. The next day she still had no answer, so I kicked her out. She immediately went on holiday with her new girlfriend while her furniture stayed with me. Not knowing what to do with my anger, I finally bought this axe at Karstadt to blow off steam and to give her at least a small feeling of loss – which she obviously did not have after our break-up.In the 14 days of her holiday, every day I axed one piece of her furniture. I kept the remains there, as an expression of my inner condition. The more her room filled with chopped furniture acquiring the look of my soul, the better I felt. Two weeks later when she came back for her furniture. It was neatly arranged into small heaps and fragments of wood. She took that trash and left my apartment for good. And so the axe was promoted to a therapy instrument.
A box of gourmet microwave popcorn
Boulder, Colorado
September 2012 – November 2012
She was a regional buyer for a grocer and that meant I got to try some great samples. I miss her, her dog, and the samples, and can’t stand to have this fancy microwave popcorn in my house.
Two figurines
10 years
Dublin, Ireland
These two little figurines symbolize my two children. Today they are in their thirties. I wanted to find a little home for these figurines.
My heart was broken in England in the 1980s when I could no longer accept my husband’s vicious temper. The eldest child bore the brunt of it, and I simply had to take responsibility for their safety. We left without his knowledge and travelled to Ireland by boat on a winter night. We came only with the clothes we were wearing. Ironically, it was my eldest girl who was most distraught. “Leaving Daddy behind” was the hardest part.
A couple of years later, when we had settled into our new life, I purchased these two little figurines to remember these sweet little girls. The older one loved writing letters to her Dad and the youngest loved knitting. The inscriptions on the bases are- “Wishing you a warm and cosy winter” and “He hasn’t forgotten me”. My husband never improved his mean temper, but the girls still keep in touch. Thanks for this opportunity.
Red shoes
2 years
Paris, France
We met at work 20 years ago. I fell in love with him as soon as I saw him. During that time he met a girl and got a child, I myself had two children. We were great friends and what was bound to happen indeed happened! He left his wife and I was already separated from the father of my children. We experienced a powerful story full of travelling and intense moments where he found some sort of freedom in my company, but as Catherine Ringer put it so well, “les histoires d’Amour finissent mal en généraaaal”. He got these shoes for me from a sex shop in Pigalle.
What kind of response it got initially?
The public response was amazing and the authors very soon began to seriously consider numerous invitations for hosting the exhibition. This idea is so universal and it touches people from different religions, cultures and races. It deals with something that almost everybody can relate to. We never thought it would last for so long or that we would be travelling the world for seven years, and that it will continue. The travelling exhibitions as well as our permanent display have been drawing a huge media attention and we are very proud to have an enviable press clip with articles and reports from some of the world famous written and television media. So far, more than 550.000 people all over the world have visited our exhibitions.
Was it successful in winning any award or title?
The Museum of Broken Relationships is privately run, self-sustainable museum. 90% of the operating budget comes from our own income (ticket sales, merchandise) and 10% is public funding (some of our travelling exhibitions are in a small segment funded by Croatian Ministry of Culture). Unfortunately, the government has not shown too much interest for funding the project.
However, one particular acknowledgement that has been a great honour to receive and that represented a significant boost for our future work has to be emphasised. At the European Museum of the Year Award 2011 ceremony, held in Bremerhaven we were presented with the ‘Kenneth Hudson Award’ given in honour of the founder of EMYA, which was given to the museum, person, project or group of people who have demonstrated the most unusual, daring and, perhaps, controversial achievement that challenges common perceptions of the role of the museums in society. The museum’s capacity to cross borders and inspire cross-cultural compassion and understanding was explicitly praised by the EMYA jury who rated the importance of public quality and innovation as fundamental elements of our museum.
Around how many items do you have till date?
It is difficult to tell the exact number of donations in our collection because we are receiving new ones each day but roughly there are 1300 objects in the collection. This includes permanent and temporary exhibitions and the objects in our storage which travel on occasion.
All donations are brought to Zagreb after each exhibition and become part of our collection. They are carefully stored and taken care of until they find their place in our permanent display or one of our upcoming travelling exhibitions.
Donations also arrive on our Zagreb address independently. In these cases the donors have to follow the donation procedure outlined on our website which requires them to fill out our online form and send it signed with their donation to the museum. Our collection currently comprises over 1300 donations and is still growing. Although we very rarely refuse a donation, we are now at a stage when due to the ever-increasing size of our collection, we no longer actively encourage donating. Also, we cannot guarantee when and where a particular donation will be exhibited.
Is it located in other parts of the world as well?
Besides the permanent display in Zagreb, the Museum of Broken Relationships continuously functions as a travelling museum. Since, its beginning in 2006, the exhibition has travelled to twenty countries visiting thirty cities worldwide. All of the other stops on our world tour are only temporary and consist of both objects taken from our existing collection and those collected locally. There is a call for donations a few months prior to the opening of the exhibition and the local population are invited to donate their objects for the temporary display. Once the exhibition finishes, all of the donations are taken back to Zagreb. This ensures that no two exhibitions are ever the same and is the reason why our Zagreb museum showcases objects from towns and cities as diverse as Kilkenny in Ireland, Manila in the Philippines and also in Amsterdam, Paris, Singapore and so on.
Tell us something about ‘Brokenship’s Café’. And is it a part of the museum?
The Brokenships Café is a small cute café where people can have a coffee or maybe a stronger drink after they visit the museum. It is open for everyone. So, it is a pretty lively corner where people meet, chat and laugh, especially during summer time when Zagreb is crowded with tourists from all over the world.
Its relation with the museum is very strong – there are bookshelves full of different books on love, break-ups and human emotions that people can borrow and read while they sit and enjoy their drink. We also have lots of thematic events – mostly different workshops, project presentations and jazz evenings, and this is also one of the sources of our income.
Which age group people mostly contribute to the museum items?
The profile of our donors ranges from teenagers to older people, but I can say that mostly we receive items from women between 20 and 40. However, this depends on the country for some reason. For example, in Taipei most of our donors were very young while in Belgium they were mostly over thirty. We don’t have exact statistics, this is only our estimation.
Picture Courtesy : MBR by Alan Vajdic and Ana Opalic; Official Facebook group of Museum of Broken Relationships
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