On Collecting as a Psychological Condition
A Live Online Conversation with Viktor Wynd and Lena Heide-Brennand
In this newly reimagined online event, Viktor Wynd turns his formidable curiosity back upon the question that has shaped his life: what does it mean to collect — and when does collecting become a condition rather than a choice?
Presented as a lively conversation rather than a solitary lecture, the evening opens Wynd’s extraordinary world of objects to dialogue and audience Q&A. His collections range from natural history to relics of the dead, from surrealist masterpieces to children’s toys, from ethnographica to occult art, orchids, ferns, spirit drawings, extinct birds, tropical fish, magic stones, mammoth bones — and the improbable, the beautiful, and the faintly disturbing in between.
A dodo’s bone beside an ostrich skeleton.
An Asmat death mask beside a painting by Leonora Carrington.
A giant crab sharing psychic space with thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of other curiosities.
But spectacle is only the surface.
Beneath the accumulation lies a more disquieting inquiry:
Why do some individuals experience possession not as pleasure but as necessity?
What inner architecture compels the acquisition of one more relic, one more fragment, one more charged object?
Is collecting preservation, devotion, taxonomy — or something closer to obsession?
Together, Wynd and Heide-Brennand will explore collecting as ritual practice, cabinet theatre, existential strategy, and psychological terrain. They will question whether the cabinet of curiosity is a proto-museum, an anti-museum, or a deeply personal cosmology constructed against chaos.
Expect intellectual mischief, rigorous thought, eccentric digressions, and an engaged audience Q&A.
Some people collect things.
Some people create worlds.
Speaker Bio:
Viktor Wynd, proprietor of London’s eponymous (nay infamous) Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History has spent the last twenty five years telling stories to audiences across the globe. Fascinated by traditional fairy tales his repetoire includes tales from The Brothers Grimm, The Arabian Nights, Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, France, Irieland, Africa, Papua New Guinea & North America – so far.
Curated & Hosted By:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
