SILVIA PIO
A few weeks before the wedding, my best friend’s daughter decided to break up with her boyfriend, with whom she had been sharing a flat for two years.
What to do with the stuff in the flat? Furniture and appliances? It is hard to sit at a table and sort things after a separation… But the thorniest question for the girl was what to do with the voluptuous and tailor-made wedding dress.
After my friend told me this story, I came across an article in a national newspaper about a Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia, and I couldn’t believe it existed. That would have been the right place for the dress to end up in.
This unique Museum was founded by artists Olinka Vištica, a film producer, and Dražen Grubišić, a sculptor, and grew from a traveling exhibition in 2006 to an award-winning museum in 2011, receiving the Kenneth Hudson Award for Europe’s most innovative museum.
After their four-year love relationship came to an end in 2003, Olinka and Dražen joked about setting up a museum to house the left-over personal items. They then started asking their friends to donate objects left behind from their break-ups, and the collection was born.
It consists of approximately 3,500 objects donated by individuals from around the world, and it is continually growing. Each item is a symbolic reminder of a past relationship, accompanied by an anonymous story from the donor. Due to physical space limitations, not all the objects are displayed at the same time; a traveling exhibition has toured 68 cities across 35 countries, including Tokyo, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, London, and Shanghai, playing a vital role in expanding the collection and adding more social, cultural, and historical context to the narratives of heartbreak and separation.
One of the most visited in Croatia, the museum can also be seen virtually https://brokenships.com, enabling more and more people to see the pieces and read the stories, and also to become donors by uploading their images and documents.
«The Museum of Broken Relationships is a physical and virtual public space created with the sole purpose of treasuring and sharing your heartbreak stories and symbolic possessions. It is a museum about you, about us, about the ways we love and lose.» (from the museum’s website)
The Museum has a branch in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in the historic Yong Chiang Building, located near the Warorot Market (Kad Luang). «This site serves as a confluence of three roads: Wichayanont Road to the north, Thapae Road to the east, and Chang Klan Road to the south, making it an inviting point for people to gather and reflect on fragmented love. The area features a variety of restaurants, cafes, shops, and artisanal crafts. Thus, the museum aspires to be a must-visit destination and creates a space for people to connect through shared stories and experiences related to love, farewell, and memories.»
Did my girlfriend’s daughter send her wedding dress to the museum? No, she just wanted to leave everything behind as soon as possible and donated it to a local charity managing a second-hand clothes shop. But finding out about the museum made us all talk about our broken relationships, wishing some of the objects from those stories would have ended in the museum, where we could have had a last look at them.
https://brokenships.com
https://www.facebook.com/Brokenships/