Flooded by Mail

The 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to the closure of the Tate Britain restaurant in London which had advertised its 55-foot-long racist mural from the 1920s as “the most amusing room in Europe”. Suddenly it was obvious. The text introduces strategies of anti-hegemonic amateur collecting and examines why the killing of a Black man by U. S. police in public implicates us in Europe. A number of objects found online are useful for this task: the trial minting of a coin commemorating the collapse of the Cologne City Archive that never entered circulation, a board game from a 1932 German film, stock photos and generic copperplate engravings from the same family over centuries, Cölln Flocken trading cards, postcards from a wall in Morocco, a procession in Cologne and a possessed harbor in Spain, and a 1970s conceptualist installation with postcards of rough seas along the British coast.