The Museum of Broken Relationships

Zvonimir Dobrovic got the idea for his Museum of Broken Relationships in Berlin from two Croatian artists who broke up and put all the artifacts of their lost love on display. The idea was to disconnect themselves from the emotional energy of the objects yet preserve them, allow them to convalesce, and act as a collective emotional therapy for the greater world.

A woman from Ljubljana donated her coffee pot which she used to brew coffee for her long ago love, even after they broke up and he came back to visit. Sometimes she would make herself coffee to remember him. "As I would like to break this endless circle I decided to donate it to the museum."

Another mad as hell woman from Sarajevo gave the museum a pen: "I'm just really sorry I didn’t break this pen as soon as I got it, because if I did I wouldn’t have written all that romantic crap he did not deserve."

A Croatian war veteran donated his artificial leg to commemorate his dead romance with the "beautiful, young and ambitious social worker" who helped him get back no his feet: "The prosthetic limb endured longer than our love. It was made of better material!"

Another woman from Berlin (it's mostly women) donated an ax:

"She was the first woman that I let move in with me. All my friends thought I needed to learn to let people in more. After a few months …I was offered the opportunity to travel to the US. She could not come with me. We said goodbye tearfully at the airport with assurances from her that she could not survive three weeks without me. When I returned after three weeks she said: 'I fell in love with someone else. I've known her for four days but I know that she gives me all that you cannot give me.'

"I kicked her out. She went immediately with her new girlfriend on holiday while her furniture stayed with me. Not knowing what to do with my anger, I bought this ax to blow off some steam and to give her at least a small feeling of loss. I started to ax one piece of furniture a day. The more her room filled up with chopped up furniture, the more I started to feel better. Two weeks after she was kicked out she came to take the furniture. It was neatly arranged into small heaps and fragments of wood."