VIKTOR WYND: Gold-plated skull of a hippopotamus
that used to belong to the drug dealer Pablo Escobar.
COMM: You won’t find many museums that exhibit
shrunken heads, celebrity poo and chocolate prime ministers. But in this little museum
in Hackney, anything out of the ordinary is welcome.
VIKTOR WYND: My name is Viktor Wynd and this
is the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History.
VIKTOR WYND: This is more of a traditional
cabinet of curiosities. So, you have everything from the, from animal skulls – we start
with a giraffe, and a lion and then we go all the way up through birds and fish to the
smallest moth, dead things in bottles.
VIKTOR WYND: I think I probably always wanted
to have my museum, proper sort of old fashioned museum like that, sort of museum that existed
before the Enlightenment came along really. It was just everything that was amazing, and
wonderful and beautiful and strange.
VIKTOR WYND: The head of a unicorn.
VIKTOR WYND: The penis bone of the walrus,
The Naughty Nun, Sex Instructions For Irish Farmers, Enid Blyton’s Gay Story Book. We
have a casket that contains some of the original darkness that Moses called down upon Earth.
There is some blood that I squeezed from a stone. Amy Winehouse's poo. Everything in
this museum was collected by me. I’ve been all over the world. I’ve been to New Guinea,
I’ve been to the Congo, I’ve been to Latin America, I’ve been to Bognor Regis. Wherever
I’ve had scent of something, but also I can’t leave the house without finding something
wherever I am. This is an ancient occult manuscript. I have to admit that I’m always a little
bit sceptical of other cultures, because, you see, they turn up with sort of plastic
shopping bags and grow their beards and bit of body odour and I’m not at all convinced
that they are in touch with the secret forces that rule this universe.
VIKTOR WYND: Up here we have the preserved
front bottoms of Victorian prostitutes.
VIKTOR WYND: I think I’m probably rather
bored and depressed, so anything that makes my eyes sparkle and sort of wakes me up and
distracts me from mundanity of life gives me joy. Anything that sings to me and says
it needs a home, I’ll buy it.
VIKTOR WYND: We have the largest invertebrate
of a Japanese giant spider crab. Condoms and Viagra taken from a hotel room and used by
the Rolling Stones.
VIKTOR WYND: The museum is designed to
be a home for people who aren’t necessarily at home in a Wetherspoon’s or, you know,
WHSmith or something. There are customers who come down, take one look and leave, quite
often in a hurry, but we do get the customers who come here and realise that this place
has been built for them and that this is their home and they feel happy here.
VIKTOR WYND: Dead babies in bottles.
VIKTOR WYND: McDonald happy toys. I have a
big collection of McDonalds happy toys. I think they are very very strange.
VIKTOR WYND: I mean with that my main, I think,
enemy is IKEA. That’s the thing I want to fight, the sort of blandness, when you go
to everyone’s home and everybody in this country more or less now is conceived on an
IKEA bed, I mean I can’t think of anything duller myself. And they have all of these
things that look the same.
VIKTOR WYND: I bought this bean pod the other
day from a boy called Jonathan and he said that if I were to plant one of the beans,
it would grow very very big, but I was to be very careful about climbing up the beanstalk.