Details:

To Abolish and To Defend:

Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest (2023) with filmmaker Sasha Tycko

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Since April 2021, police abolitionists and environmentalists have been engaged in a struggle to prevent the destruction of a stretch of urban forest in Atlanta, Georgia, where the government aims to build the largest police training compound in the U.S. known as “Cop City” and facilitate the construction of a giant soundstage for the film industry. The land slated for development has long been the site of racialized violence: violently stolen from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, it later became the site of a 19th-century slave plantation, and functioned as a forced labor camp—the Old Atlanta Prison Farm—as late as the 1990s. If completed, Cop City will serve as a national model of counterinsurgency with immediate and global repercussions. 

For over a year, protestors lived in the Weelaunee forest, building a community of passionate forest defenders that drew the interest of Atlanta-based filmmaker and anthropologist Sasha Tycko. Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest follows one forest defender as he slowly learns to build a hut by hand, envisioning a future lived off-the-grid as the climate worsens. By patiently following the building process and immersing herself in the daily life of the forest occupation, Tycko explores the utopian currents of the movement to Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest. As the fight against a militarized police force unfolds in the background, the observational film contemplates time, craft, and the making of a life worth defending in a highly charged landscape. 

The screening will be followed by an in-person Q&A with the filmmaker.

About the film

Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest (Sasha Tycko, 40min, video, 2023)

About the filmmaker

Sasha Tycko is an anthropologist and artist living in Atlanta. Her PhD research in the department of Anthropology at Emory University focuses on the Atlanta forest that became the site of intense conflict over the city’s proposal to construct a police training complex known as “Cop City.” Over two years of living and working in the forest, Sasha used a range of media to explore how the abandoned forest landscape—the former site of the city prison farm and a slave plantation--motivates new articulations of history, nature, and ethics. Through this work, she has produced two films, Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest and Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work, and a photography exhibition, Ways of the Atlanta Forest, currently on view at Emory University. Her writing and photographs have been published in n+1 magazine, Jewish Currents, and Ill Will Editions, and her films have screened at a variety of venues around the country.

 Programmed by Kang Kang (Comparative Literary Studies) of the Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

This screening is supported by the Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu