Museum of broken relationships
Former couple dražen grubišić and olinka vištica collect the detritus of shattered love.
On a plinth in a gallery in Zagreb, Croatia, sits a child’s frisbee. The plaque beside it reads, “A stupid frisbee, bought in a thrift store, was my ex-boyfriend’s brilliant idea – as a second anniversary gift. The moral was obviously that he should be smacked with it right across the face the next time he gets such a fantastic idea.” Welcome to the Museum of Broken Relationships. We’re all heartbroken here. “We actually came up with the idea while we were going through our own break-up,” laughs artist Olinka Vištica, who founded the museum in 2006 with fellow artist and partner of four years Dražen Grubišic. “Dražen and I had so many sleepless nights just talking about what was going to happen if we went our separate ways.” Chief among their logistical priorities was a beloved wind-up toy rabbit they called Honey Bunny. “We kept coming back to that question: what happens to Honey Bunny if we break up?” Olinka says. “During one of those long nights, we had the spark of an idea. What if there was a space, a kind of treasure trove for broken relationships, where you could send all those objects that once meant so much?”
Olinka and Dražen went their separate ways and the idea lay dormant for a couple of years, until Dražen suggested they submit it to the 2006 Zagreb Salon – Croatia’s largest exhibition of new art.
“They accepted and said, ‘You have two weeks to put it together,’” Dražen remembers. “Also, you have to do it in the garden.” Harvesting the ephemera of their own broken love – Honey Bunny included – as well as contributions from both friends and strangers, the first Museum of Broken Relationships saw 46 items arranged in a shipping container. Attached to each object was a plaque written by the anonymous donor, explaining the item’s significance. “The museum was only supposed to be there for a couple of months,” Olinka says, “but then a newspaper did a story on us and it just went viral.”
Thirteen years on, the project now boasts permanent collections in Zagreb and Los Angeles, as well as a roving exhibit that’s popped up in more than 50 locations around the world. Their full collection stands at more than 4000 anonymously submitted objects, from the slightly more predictable – a pair of Irish Claddagh rings that represent love, loyalty and friendship – to the much less so. “In Zagreb, we have a scab that was submitted by an Austrian girl,” Olinka says. “She was a biologist, so she kept her ex-boyfriend’s scab and sent it to us when they split.”
According to Olinka and Dražen, the museum’s success is a tribute to two things: the universality of loss and humanity’s need to tell
stories. “When you love, you are really living your life,” Olinka says. “And when it’s over, we tell stories because it’s such a strong experience. Telling a story about it means you want to leave proof that it existed. We want to make our experiences eternal.”
The Museum of Broken Relationships has received stories from every continent on Earth, and the cultural differences can be revealing. “We like to joke that the French talk about their break-ups as if they’ve just spent a year in therapy and now want to tell you what they’ve learnt,” Dražen says. Contributions from East Asia tend to speak of gratitude and acceptance, while in the West, it’s usually about how the storytellers themselves have been wronged, or their own feeling of devastation. “You can really see that ‘I’ culture,” Dražen says.
But more striking than the differences are the things that bind us all together. “In general, you could change the name of the cities and no one would notice,” Dražen says. “Whether it’s Cape Town or Buenos Aires or New York or Manila, everyone feels the loss of love in the same way.” Deciding on new displays for the permanent collections is a formidable task. “We never show more than 100 items at a time,” Dražen explains. “Last time we spent more than a year choosing which stories to include.”
It’s not simply a question of picking the most beautiful or unusual objects, Olinka says. They also have to cover the full range of emotion, geography and even time. “You can really see how the artefacts of love change throughout history,” Olinka says. On one plinth you might discover their oldest object – a postcard from World War I, submitted on behalf of someone’s grandmother – while on another, you’ll find a black vibrator sent in by a divorcée in Indiana.
For Dražen and Olinka, some of the most fascinating items are those that aren’t even romantic in nature. “We’ve had people going gluten free and saying goodbye to bread,” Dražen says. “People breaking up with politicians who they feel have betrayed them. There’s a lot of family stuff. Pets, too. Some people even break up with themselves.”
“It’s impossible to pick a favourite piece,” Olinka adds. “They’re so diverse and you’re always being struck by their humour or strangeness or the strength they show. But I do remember a few years ago being sent this huge pair of basketball shoes by someone in the United States. And the story was just two lines: ‘We played basketball together. You were straight and I was gay and that killed me inside.’ I’ll never get tired of those simple stories – the one or two-liners that open a whole world up to you."