The Museum of Broken Relationships is this incredible concept museum started in Zagreb where people donate mementos and artefacts from their failed relationship and write a little blurb about the object.  I did a bit of online browsing of their exhibit and found the below object and entry.  This gentleman has taken anger management to a whole new level!  The museum is based in Zagreb which is not on most people’s to do list, but the exhibition travels every once in a while (it was in London over the summer apparently) so keep an eye out for it!  And if you are doing some spring cleaning and find something which fits into the “don’t want to keep it but feel guilty about throwing it away” category… Send it to them!

An Ex Axe

1995 
Berlin, Germany

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. A few months after she moved in, I was offered to travel to the US. She could not come along. At the airport we said goodbye in tears, and she was assuring me she could not survive three weeks without me. I returned after three weeks, and she said: “I fell in love with someone else. I have known her for just 4 days, but I know that she can give me everything that you cannot.”

I was banal and asked about her plans regarding our life together. The next day she still had no answer, so I kicked her out. She immediately went on holiday with her new girlfriend while her furniture stayed with me. Not knowing what to do with my anger, I finally bought this axe at Karstadt to blow off steam and to give her at least a small feeling of loss – which she obviously did not have after our break-up.

In the 14 days of her holiday, every day I axed one piece of her furniture. I kept the remains there, as an expression of my inner condition. The more her room filled with chopped furniture acquiring the look of my soul, the better I felt. 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.