The 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to the closure of the Tate Britain restaurant in London, which until then had promoted a 55-foot-long racist mural by Rex Whistler that dated from the 1920s as 'the most amusing room in Europe'. Suddenly it was obvious. Flooded by Mail is a book that introduces strategies of anti-hegemonic amateur collecting and examines why the killing of a Black man by US 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, Köllnflocken 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.