Kunsthalle Mainz. Am Zollhafen 3 – 5, 55118 Mainz

Wednesday, December 10, 2025
6 PM
Cost: included in admission

“Dark heritage” or dark legacy describes places, events, and objects that have become witnesses to violence, destruction, and death. Conflicts over the control of land and resources have, over time, inscribed themselves into the landscape in the form of ruins, monuments, barracks, but also land use (mines, agricultural areas, forest regions). Using examples from the current exhibition and the research topics of Taylor McConnell and Jadon Nisly-Goretzki, we will discuss the legacies of humanity.

Taylor McConnell is an academic staff member at the Institute for Film, Theatre, Media, and Cultural Studies at JGU Mainz. In his doctoral thesis in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, he explored the intersections of memory, violence, power, and identity in the context of the Croatian War of Independence/”Homeland War” from 1991 to 1995 and its consequences. His latest project involves a multi-site ethnography of airports in the Rhine-Main region, which partly challenges Marc Augé’s (1995) designation of transit-oriented spaces as “non-places”.

Jadon Nisly-Goretzki is an academic staff member and postdoctoral researcher in agricultural history and transformation at the Faculty of Ecological Agricultural Sciences at the University of Kassel. He completed his doctorate on human-livestock relationships and gender in the late Enlightenment. In a current project, he focuses on environment, gender, and labor relations in small-scale farming of the 18th and 19th centuries. A second project deals with colonial agriculture and memory politics using the former German Colonial School in Witzenhausen.