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See Guatemala through the eyes of two accomplished local artists, Santiago Lucah and Bryan Castro. Known for creating visuals shot through with incisive sociopolitical commentary, here Lucah and Castro explore the theme of toxicity through meditations on two insidious elements of Guatemalan society: violence and alcohol. Using toxicity as an analytic to apprehend violence and alcohol draws to the fore a nexus of structural, symbolic, physical, and environmental forms of violence that pervade everyday life in Guatemala.

Columbia University has worked in tandem with New York City to engage in “urban renewal,” aka gentrification, mapping themselves further onto the spaces of West Harlem through processes of capital accumulation and slow violence. Their engagements with such notions as “the greater good” feed into their identity as an “Acropolis” on the hill, perpetuating a form of white nationalism under the guise of “development.”How do urban institutions such as Columbia University operate as power brokers so as to colonize their neighborhoods and craft whiteness internally and abroad?