Zagreb’s museum of broken relationships
I’m forever fascinated by the normative urge to destroy the artefacts of your past relationships. When you’re first moving on from a particularly catastrophic friendship breakup, I can understand the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality of removing any and all residual traces of the person’s presence. Truly, little can be more irksome than Apple’s featured photos bringing a face you’d rather forget to the fore. Nevertheless, to discard the photographs, figurines, and handmade gifts of a fallen friend feels akin to erasing the past. To destroy that one keychain, crochet stuffed animal, or set of clay figurines that reminds you of your lost friendship fixates on the final explosion of feeling more than the years of laughter and late-night soirees. What, then, do we do with these artefacts of the past, these unwelcome reminders of friendship failure and bittersweet mementos of a cherished past?
The Museum of Broken Relationships (or Muzej prekinutih veza), located in Zagreb, Croatia, was founded in 2006 by Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić as a permanent home for these very artefacts. Originating with the founders’ own relationship dissolution, the museum houses a collection of objects with attached anecdotes of lost love. In an essay detailing her experience of navigating the museum, Leslie Jameson writes, “When it comes to breakups, we are attached to certain dominant narratives of purgation, liberation, and exorcism: the idea that we’re supposed to want to get the memories out of us, free ourselves from their grip.” Indeed, these narratives of purgation encourage rituals of forgetting. Rather than detach our hearts from the carnage of a relationship’s final hour, we detach ourselves from portions of our own past. Your friends tell you to forget is to be free, and with little hesitation, you smash the ‘Delete’ button on old photos and dump boxes of old belongings. As if an object’s destruction can simultaneously destroy the person’s hold on your head (empirical studies on catharsis suggest otherwise). More importantly, if we forget the failures of the past, how will we then prevent failures in the future?
With everything from toaster ovens, crumbling gingerbread cookies, and sole stilettos, the museum’s online archive enshrines a space for the mundane. Jameson remarks, “The museum’s objects understood that a breakup is powerful because it saturates the banality of daily life, just as the relationship itself did: every errand, every annoying alarm-clock chirp, every late-night Netflix rental. Once love is gone, it’s gone everywhere: a ghost suffusing daily life just as powerfully in its absence.” Perhaps we’re so quick to axe the artefacts populating our homes because the banal becomes the bane of our daily life. The old birthday cards buried in your junk drawer are no longer a growing collection but a grave, filled with artefacts of absence.
How is it that something as simple as a “Stupid Frisbee,” as one poster titles their donation, can carry so much emotional weight? Carrying forward the themes from our last issue (of “situationships” and their incredible psychological turmoil), I’d speculate the root cause remains the fantasy of what could have been: of “that time we dreamed the same dream.” Thinking in potentials, you incidentally allow the dream to replace reality. The present has the wool pulled over its eyes, and the moment things go awry, your former hopes only harm. Does that mean we should stop dreaming? Of course not. Should we burn the relics of the past in protest? I dare say no, we’d be missing the point.
The museum’s exhibit allows us to understand these objects not as a graveyard of unrealised hopes, but as layers to various lives—relationships lamented, but not forgotten. Irreplaceable parts of your nesting ball of selfhood, aspects of the coming-of-age stories adults pass on to the younger generations. This archive of artefacts allows for a method of “seeing every self as an accumulation of its loves,” rather than an ether of ends. And what better way to memorialise your estranged primary school playmates than in frisbees, glass frogs, or in lyrics encapsulating your love? In the words of Alfred Tennyson, in a phrase well-known yet oft-forgotten in moments of photo-purgation, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”
