Valentine's Day is the feast of love but there are also those who take care of broken hearts. When a story breaks and the heart explodes into a thousand pieces, leaving those who live this negative experience without strength, an unfillable void opens. Who will ever remember so much pain? «Loss is a trauma that needs to be accompanied. Love wounds heal over time but there is always a trail of regret that can teach many things. For example, that human relationships need continuous care». Speaking is Olinka Vištica, director of the first world museum dedicated to broken relationships. It is located in Zagreb and was created to preserve and share the most intense love stories, along with the objects that symbolized that relationship. At the Museum of Broken Relationships there is everything. From the most banal things: dolls, paintings, poems, books, jewelry, shoes, to the most unusual ones such as an axe used to chop up the wood of the house furniture. In short, everything that for a couple represented 'the' symbol of the union.
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The museum is a huge exhibition on how we love and dissipate affections. Every year it captures crowds of tourists and the collection of exhibited pieces (with the memory of what they represented) has been the subject of successful exhibitions in the largest capitals. «In some ways the exhibition is almost a therapy that can help overcome the process of loss for those who have suffered it and, at the same time, is a lesson for anyone who reads the stories, often identifying themselves». All the stories told are strictly anonymous, only the cities and the region of the world where the breakup of a marriage or engagement took place are reported: Mexico City, Rome, Paris, Dublin, Berlin, Bucharest.
The artistic project was born from an idea of Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić. In 2006 they won the EMYA Kenneth Hudson Award as the most innovative and bold museum project in Europe. Of course, Olinka and Drazen once formed a couple and they themselves were not immune from the pain of a breakup when things no longer worked. In 2003, the year of the separation, they had to divide all the things they had in their common house. Faced with a doll that was a kind of mascot for them, they found themselves uncomfortable: who should it go to? «It was the symbol of our story, of the time spent together, it was part of a nice ritual. Every time one of them left for work, they put it in their suitcase and photographed it on the trip, a way to tell the other the preciousness of time together».
They decided that neither of them could keep it and from there the idea of setting up a special place for love stories that ended badly, a place of collective repair but also of reflection. The Museum of Broken Relationships has been collecting museum pieces since 2006. Have you been left? Have you had the unhappy experience of a broken relationship? Just go to the website and send your memory and symbol to the address of the museum in Zagreb (brokenships.com).
An American soldier sent a set of United Nations cards he used to distract himself from his distant love. Dadu and Luiza, Romanians, donated a leather cord to be worn on the wrist accompanied by a note that almost seems like a poem: «We wore these bracelets, we thought they would last forever, like our love. The bracelet is still intact, our story is now something in the past».
There are those who sent an old magazine with the name of his girlfriend scribbled on it to the museum, those who sent gastritis pills, those who sent a prosthesis and even those who sent an herpes cream from Germany. Objects mirror of humanity. Some speak of stories interrupted by immigration, others that refer to the pandemic, others still to Brexit.
The director of the museum is convinced that just like mourning, the end of a love relationship should be celebrated with a ritual. Far from rancor, looking to the future. It's the only way to create something new. «Drazen and I for example have been together as a couple for years. But now we have been planning the museum together for 20 years».
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