This thesis examines the work of two contemporary female artists—Minia Biabiany (b. 1988), a Guadeloupean installation and video artist, and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948), a Chilean artist who works primarily with installation, performance and sculpture.  Their works address the intersections of environmentalism and post-colonialism, from positions on the “peripheries” of a Euro-Amero-centric world.  In this essay, I explore how both artists figure slow violence, a form of violence that dispenses harm gradually and in potentially invisible ways, into their work by employing strategies of abstraction and foregrounding connectivity in their constructions.  I argue that these works are uniquely suited to address the challenge of figuring those harms that are most difficult to name and comprehend.