To live in this world
You must be able to do three things...
Museum of Broken Relationships lures with an irresistible tag...
1. To love what is mortal
After shedding your skin in Berlin, you arrive in Zagreb at dawn with no money, no camera and a mesothelioma lawsuit on your mind. Taking a rest on the steps of the bus station, a crippled poet spontaneously gifts you with nectarines...and Zagrljaj!
2. To hold it against your bones
knowing your own life depends on it.
You insist that Tomislav autograph his book, and when he hands it back, you hold it to your heart, as if your life depends on it..
As dusk falls, you discover that tagging MISSING JAMES FRANCO 3.0
"Can I have a sticker?"
The request comes from Luka Didnak, who stops before you to discuss James Franco: "He does what he wants and doesn't care what anyone thinks." He has the best bicycle and you tell him that you hope he will tag it when you hand him the sticker.
You mourn your gadget loss again and make tags in your head like scenes in a film that will have to be retraced with a new apparatus.
The next day, in a state of GADGET LOVE MOURNING, you are reduced to pressing your face against the glass...
Windows offering MS Office Tools to keep your Love always close to your heart drive..and so you find a remedy -- a digital camera!
The award-winning Museum of Broken Relationships invites a Franco crossing of boundaries via its mission statement:
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.
A visit on the rainy night of your departure from Zagreb seems to be the ideal manifestation of the Mobius Strip. A boutique offers material comforts from the wounds of heartbreak...
...a cozy cafe...
.
You linger for hours over tea and honey liquor listening to music about heartbreak and reading literary texts about lost love.
...and four exhibition galleries with donated objects. Here are some favorites:
A Berlin woman's "ex-axe" is the coldest DEATH piece on display. She weilded the instrument to chop up her ex's furniture as retaliation for being dumped for another woman: "Two weeks after she left, she came back for the furniture. It was neatly arranged into small heaps and fragments of wood. She took that trash and left my apartment for good. The axe was promoted to a therapy instrument".
A "Rabbit Fur" gift accompanied by poetry mirrors your RESURRECTION into a comforting new skin by way of this posting. Your Zagreb dream of that fertile creature manifested as a vintage coat catching your eye in the Sunday flea market.
"Four Discs" made you happy that you resolved your Office Tools issues to be able to share the LIFE/DEATH/MOURNING/RESURRECTION of the quantum leap into the THREE to get to the stability of the FOUR.
The museum began as a humble collecting project (like this one!). After recently redesigning the gallery located in an old stately house in Zagreb's Upper Town, the local success has produced a multiplying fertility effect: Museum of Broken Relationships Los Angeles, in addition to 43 exhibitions in locations ranging from Copenhagen to Jeju Island, South Korea.
3. And when the time comes,
The key to having a baby...
And so you depart from Zagreb, the City of Love, spreading some MISSING JAMES FRANCO 3.0 LOVE with profound new insights...
TO LET IT GO.
Croatian beauties: Viktorija Pralas (R), from the heart-centered Croatian family hosting The Dots resurrection in the City of Love, with her friend Tea Koritar.
Lisa Streitfeld is a Kulturindustrie philosopher out to prove Adorno wrong while on a new adventure in the Balkans.
The Missing James Franco tagging project is a Web 3.0 prototype for collaboration between art and commerce.
Participate on Twitter: #MissingJamesFranco3.0
Mary Oliver's quote from "in Backwater Woods" was written on a gallery wall.
To contribute an object to the museum collection, please refer to the contributor page.
Unless labelled otherwise, the photos in this posting by Lisa Streitfeld and published with permission of Museum of Broken Relationships. Mare Milin photo courtesy of the Museum of Broken Relationships.