Curatology™ is not alone.

Around the world, artists, thinkers, and museums have explored how objects carry memory, identity, and meaning. This page gathers some of those resonances – places where you can wander further. This list is alive. As Curatology grows, new resonances will be added. If you’ve encountered a project, book, or practice that belongs here, share it — and the resource itself becomes part of our collective museum.

Kindred Museums & Collections

Museum of Broken Relationships (Zagreb & Los Angeles)
Objects left behind after love ends, each with a story. A testament to how loss can be archived with tenderness.

Museum of Innocence (Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk)
A companion to the novel. Every object is tied to a character’s life, blurring fiction and reality.

Museum of Ordinary Objects (UK, pop-up)
An exhibition of everyday things — mugs, combs, toys — reminding us that the ordinary holds extraordinary stories.

Object Therapy (Australian National University)
Artists and designers repair broken things in unexpected ways, transforming use into meaning.

Research & Reading

Arjun Appadurai – The Social Life of Things
A foundational text on how objects gain meaning as they circulate through lives and cultures.

Daniel Miller – The Comfort of Things
Portraits of London households, showing how possessions reveal care, memory, and connection.

Sherry Turkle – Evocative Objects
Essays from thinkers exploring how personal objects shape thought and memory.

Bjorn Schiermer – Everyday Aesthetics
On the unnoticed textures of daily life, and how they quietly shape belonging.

Creative Projects & Experiments

Significant Objects
A storytelling experiment where writers invented tales about thrift-store items — proving that stories give objects value.

The Inventory of Loss
A participatory archive where people contribute memories of objects they no longer have.

Cabinet of Curiosities (historical & modern versions)
Early precursors to museums, where collections reflected wonder, curiosity, and personal worlds.

Practices

Kintsugi (Japan)
The art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, making the cracks visible and beautiful. It teaches that breakage and repair are not flaws to hide but part of an object’s history, making it more precious.

Thing Theory (Bill Brown & others)
A field in cultural studies that shifts attention from objects as commodities to things as carriers of meaning, memory, and identity. It asks: when does an object stop being “just” an object and become part of us?