The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Affect

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a place where everyone on the planet could send objects after a breakup?” It is with this thought that, after the end of their relationship, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić opened the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2010. It displays objects sourced from people all over the world, which for the senders mark the end of a relationship - heartbroken lovers, but also relationships between family members or friends. These mementoes are accompanied by personal yet anonymous texts of their ex-owners, narrating each item’s story with a date and location of the relationship. The stories range from quirky and funny to profoundly moving: from a broken garden gnome thrown on the day of their divorce by a wife at her husband’s car, after 20 years of marriage, to the heartbreaking suicide note from somebody's mother, or a letter written by a thirteen-year-old boy to his first love, while fleeing Sarajevo at the start of the Yugoslav War. This article analyses newspapers and magazine articles on the museum, video interviews of the founders and curators, as well as the design of the museum itself, with a two-fold purpose: (1) looking at the ways in which the dialectic among objects, narratives, and the museum have been constructed and affectively modulated through resonance (Wikan, 1992) and theatricality (Willis, 2014), to produce an effect; and (2) how these “affective effects” (Wetherell, 2013) contribute to processes of heritage-making, modulating from personal memories to collective forms of heritage that are as deeply affective and mobilize the museum as a space informed by ethics of care (Till, 2012).