Paper Short Abstract:

The museum guestbook at the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb (Croatia) is an integral part of the exhibition(s), and it constitutes performative spaces important for the sense of community formed in the museum's wake. The museum calls the guestbooks “books of confessions,” but their pages contain many other genres as well. How do we work with sources like these, and what can we learn from or about the anonymous writers.

Paper Abstract:

The project on the shared emotions of heartbreak in the museum space is a work in progress. Our focus is on the narrative/object tension and what we call narrative recrafting. "Narrative recrafting" refers to how people can actively reframe a significant object (or event) and hence take charge of the story in the face of a painful loss in their life (Larsen, Tillotson and Österlund-Pötzsch 2024). While preparing a manuscript on "Narrative recrafting" in The Museum of Broken Relationships we anticipated the usual reviewer response: What about the viewer experiences, the customer verbatim? Other scholars before us had already ruled out interviews after the visit to the museum, online reviews were also ruled out as a way to source consumer responses and we found ourselves left with the books of confessions. While rich and intriguing in content and format, the guestbook utterings also pose several challenges for the ethnographer, who is used to creating and controlling her own data collection. Setting out to categorize the entries in the guestbooks these challenges became clear. Whereas guestbooks are too valuable sources to ignore, their content can seem like gibberish at times: A drawing of a dog, the “I was here” in several languages, and anonymous declarations of love or dislike. In this paper, I will highlight and discuss some of these challenges and hopefully offer a few valuable solutions on how to work with guestbook materials in the museum space and beyond.