Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston in 'Separated'
Is it worth keeping the things your ex gave you? It depends. If instead of throwing them away, may end up on display in a museum, maybe it's a nice way to put a spin on the thorny issue of breakups. And not only couples, there are breaks for all tastes and of all colors: family, friends, work and even social.
Lisa literally breaking Ralph's heart.
If Zagreb and Los Angeles already had their respective ** museums of broken relations **, now a Spanish city is a candidate to host an exhibition with a very similar idea.
The architect is Yago Ferreiro , who in addition to being a writer, poet and owner of the mythical Leonese bar Belmondo , is the creator of kintsugi project , labors of lost (un)love, which wants to transform into art those objects that we associate with breakups, loss or impossible loves. “Kintsugi starts from an idea that had been around me for a long time and that was to write a manuscript with deleble ink, that is: a book that, once opened, had an expiration period and which, once finished reading , there was no record left” –he explains.
When the call for the I Scholarship for Artistic Creation of the Villalar Foundation , he tried his luck presenting a project that, in addition to the manuscript, developed the possibility of making a complementary exhibition with damaged objects that represent the loss.
Iago intends to recover these objects through the Japanese technique of kintsugi , designed to repair damaged ceramic pieces, whose fractures, instead of being hidden, are accentuated by marking the cracks with resin mixed with powder of precious metals such as gold. The philosophy of kintsugi posits that breaks are also part of the object , because they expose their history, their transformations and scars.
Yago decided to open the call for breakups that were not just love affairs, partly to run away from the cliché of romantic love as something fundamental and essential, and partly because, in his own experience, his most painful breakups They have not been the love ones, but the disagreements with friends or with social realities.
“I am very interested in the idea of trying to repair the mistakes I make in daily life using literature to do so. The kintsugi metaphor applied to literary work I find it very honest, since I believe that everyone who writes, what he is trying to do is embellish his own story, give his memory a new meaning, in order to move forward. Fiction is the most powerful form of conscious self-deception I know ”.
The Kintsugi project, Lost Labors of (un)love appeals to the need we all feel to tell our stories. That is, at least, what Iago believes that can motivate people to approach the “ broken heart mailbox ”, which he has installed in the Leon Museum and where he remained until December 15. This mailbox, manufactured by more than piñatas , is the repository of all objects – accompanied by their corresponding breakup stories – that people want to leave inside so that they are part of the project.
Unlike Museum of Broken Relationships –Which Iago conceives as “an ideal place to carry out a good personal revenge” –, in his project it is rather that the object, almost shamanically, “ mute embellishing the memory of that story, that is: his scar ”. His intervention on each of the objects will vary depending on the degree of pain transmitted by the story that accompanies it. The more pain, the greater the intervention, as if it were a surgery.
Although he is still in the process of collecting objects, and surely there will be stories of all kinds, for now Yago is left with this one. a girl from Elche, who has sent him a record. “Apparently, he always listened to that album with a boy he had met on the internet. They connected at the same time, they put on the disc while they chatted, each one from one end of the country. So day after day. As far as I know, they never met in person ”.
The date and place of the exhibition are yet to be determined. although he is inclined to do it in a space outside the museum environment. They are not conventional objects, so they deserve to be exposed with respect and in an unconventional way . As for the production of the ephemeral manuscript, the great challenge is finding that ink that degrades over time until there is no trace of it and that turns the book itself into an allegory of loss.