Spring 2023 seminar: M.A. candidate, historic preservation planning
Christina Nagel is a first-year graduate master's student in historic preservation planning at Cornell University. Nagel is Bolivian with a Quechua/Aymara indigenous background which greatly informs her praxis. Nagel is a critical spatial practitioner (preservationist) focused on critical historic preservation and the questions of values, heritage, materiality, architecture, and the built environment intertwined with the politics of spaces and the subaltern subject within those spaces. She is interested in critical and architectural theory, focused on indigenous cosmologies and anti-colonial epistemologies, and is ontologically abolitonist within her practice - using Andean oral histories, storytelling, and philosophy within thinking about conceptions of space, architecture, and preservation. She creates connections and rhizomes to reimagine urban possibilities and vernacular realities that are indigenous and Black futurist, intertwined with the voices of ancestral traditions. Preserved architectural buildings are imbued with collective memories, histories, and politics, and in using cartography, topography, geography, oral history, Nagel looks at decolonizing heritage and preservation. Nagel has a bachelor's degree from SUNY Binghamton University in History focused on Andean Latin America and a master's degree from Syracuse University–Newhouse in Arts Criticism/Journalism focused on Architecture and its intersection with politics.