The Museum Of Broken Relationships

The European Museum Of The Year nominees for 2011 do not include  The Transparent Factory in Dresden or even the Museo del Whisky in the north of Spain, each a rather valuable peak on the curated landscape. No, but among them is the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb. While you're crossing your fingers for the win, you might also consider bequeathing a fragment of your own. Anyway, that's how the collection in Croatia got started: a splitting couple couldn't decide on the fate of some shared objects and so they thought, We should start a museum! And set about soliciting objets from their, er, social network. In the collection now, there's The Ex Axe (1995) from Berlin; the Divorce Day Mad Dwarf (marking the end of a 20 year liaison) from Slovenia; and some fuzzy pink handcuffs (2005) from Zagreb. Founders Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić explain, "Our societies oblige us with our marriages, funerals, and even graduation farewells, but deny us any formal recognition of the demise of a relationship, despite its strong emotional effect. In the words of Roland Barthes in A Lover's Discourse: 'Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator... (there is) no amorous oblation without a final theater.'" Or, in modern American terms, welcome to the Museum of Closure.