Show me your sceleton box

handcuffs, now holding time
Well... this is an awesome event I would like to attend: It takes place these days in Berlin. An exhibition of personal tokens from love stories that came to an end. Divorced, departed, alienated, after the fever of closeness. What happened to you after you "broke up", "split", "fell apart"? Everyone has to go through different paths, to come to terms with the events, the reasons of the breaking up, the precise details, the anniversaries that come and go, torturing, uninhabited, but still like long abandoned archaeological sites, "there" but not standing anymore in their vivid actuality. Apart from this difficult turning point in our private lives (on which the nation of therapists, analysts, healers, astrologists, make a fortune) there is the cruelty of the material indications of what used to be and it is not anymore. What may happen with all these gifts, the photographs, the CDs, the souvenirs? This is why some philosophers accused materiality for cruelty. The more it grows, the heavier we get. The idea of the exhibition was conceived when two Zagreb artists, Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic, split up and decided to try to heal their wounds by showing in public the proofs of their finale. In Bosnia-Herzegovina the exhibition attracted many supporters. People donated 300 objects to add to the initial core of the collection. In Germany, in Berlin, already appeared 30 objects-tokens, a wedding dress, the axe that a deserted lover used for destroying the furniture of his "ex-", Valentine underwear. The experience of loss and depression is universal.
the bike he used while leaving her
The episodes which occur on the borders of private/public draw my particular attention: how the rules of making sense of private stories mix with the rhetorics of public exposure. The public sphere, expanding to the fragments of the personal territory, with the spicy curiosity of a voyeur is something common with time. Take a glimpse, for instance, at the story of the final days of Diana "the Princess of the People", or its repetition, in a more hilarious manner, with Britney Spears. Private details about the emotional life of someone on the scene, attract grave-robbers and the flash of the cameras, the pressing questions aiming at some irritated reaction, the cheap journalism of motorcycle hunting, may culminate even in tragedies.
1. A public sphere which tackles nothing big, that does not inspire and does not educate, 2. A bored, dull and mentally unmotivated public which is so much enclosed in its personal routine details, that are lived out in the way of a dramatic series, 3. Technical means which allow an easy and daily intrusion into private spaces and the publication of their finds, all of the above and other factors I cannot think of right now, contributeto this transformation of life into a daily series of "The Bold and the Beautiful" type of impression.
Come on, let us not theorize too much, fellow-voyeurs and victims/persecutors. What would you contribute to the exhibition, if it was to appear somewhere next door, or some doors further down? (Because I feel it might be different our donation in those two cases). What would I give if it was to be set in Jabal al Webdeh, what if in Thessaloniki, or Birmingham? Cigarette boxes painted by those beloved hands, a post valentine postcard (commemorating the first year of being apart), the almond tree flowers with which i was showered during some ancient spring, falling on the wooden floor and then picked carefully by the hand of the .
Why on earth have I kept all these, and many many more?