Skip to content

Scenes from the Atlanta Forest

  • Submissions
  • Scenes
    • General
    • News
    • Community Building
    • Report Backs
    • Communiques
    • Art
  • Resources
    • ATL Solidarity Fund
    • Maps
      • Live DTF Map
    • Counter-surveillence resource center
    • Ecodefense Guides
    • Empire Logistics
    • Forest Killers
  • other sites
    • Defend The Atlanta Forest
    • Stop Reeves Young
    • Stop the Atlanta Police Foundation
    • Cops Of Cop City
    • Atlanta Community Press Collective
    • DTF linktree
    • ATL Solidarity Fund
    • DTF Calendar

Category: Art

Bella Ciao (For Weelaunee)

Posted on January 21, 2023 by scenes

THE WORLD IS WATCHING
OUTSIDE MY WINDOW
BELLA CIAO, BELLA CIAO, BELLA CIAO CIAO CIAO

DRAGS MY SENSES INTO THE SUNLIGHT
FOR THERE ARE THINGS THAT I MUST DO

WISH ME LUCK NOW
I HAVE TO LEAVE YOU
BELLA CIAO, BELLA CIAO, BELLA CIAO CIAO CIAO

WITH MY FRIENDS NOW IN THE FOREST
WE’RE GOING TO SHAKE THE GATES OF HELL

AND I WILL TELL THEM
WE WILL TELL THEM
BELLA CIAO, BELLA CIAO, BELLA CIAO CIAO CIAO

THAT WEELAUNEE IS NOT FOR FRANCHISE
AND WISH THE BASTARDS DROP DOWN DEAD

NEXT TIME YOU SEE ME
I MAY BE SMILING
BELLA CIAO, BELLA CIAO, BELLA CIAO CIAO CIAO

I’LL BE IN PRISON OR ON THE TV
I’LL SAY THE FOREST CALLED ME HERE

Submitted anonymously over email

Posted in Art

Lockdown Lucy at Gate on Key Rd By Prison Farm

Posted on November 9, 2022 by scenes

A mannequin dressed in green military-esque coveralls sits propped up against a fence reinforced with branches and old car tires. The mannequin's neck head is partially severed, and there is a U-Lock around its neck.
On Dia de Los Muertos, a mannequin known as “Lockdown Lucy” voluntarily sacrificed themselves to U-lock their neck to the northern gate on Key Rd that is the main entrance for police & workers into the proposed “Cop City” area… They are still holding it down & helping protect/keep the northern gate locked (usually police freak out any time someone is bear, so the fact that they are a dummy wearing camo helps…. They were supposed to appear to be a forest defender but we fear SWAT may have thought it was like a positive image of a soldier or something by accident???), and between the days of All Hallows Eve & Day Of The Dead stands to represent those of us haunted by the, “ghost of tactics that do not work”…. You heard right liberals, nonprofits, NgO’s, & Earth First!…. If lock downs were the most effective thing, so many “campaigns” wouldn’t have been lost& pointless & preventable arrests made…. If people lock down and get multiple felony charges Anywyas seems like it might make sense to have other tactics on the table.
#IsYourEgoTiredOfLosingYet
#LockDownsDontLast

Submitted anonymously over email

Posted in Art

Stop Cop City tags

Posted on November 6, 2022 - November 9, 2022 by scenes

"STOP COP CITY!" Is tagged in red spray paint on a wall.
"STOP COP CITY" is painted in white over a window.
Submitted anonymously over email

Posted in Art

POETRY LESSON #1 (On Time and Fire)

Posted on September 10, 2022 by scenes

For Ryan Millsap

After SB

If you read enough poetry, Ryan, you’ll find that everything is on fire. I’ve often searched for an explanation for this, some smart and elegant history of fire in the lyric. Auden wrote a book about water, but nobody, as far as I know, has written the book about fire. Somebody ought to do it. Maybe you can pass the idea on to some of your friends in the industry. Anyway, as best as I can tell, one origin of this inheritance must be angels. Bear with me, I promise you’ll want to hear this. I’ve never read much of the bible, but I suspect everything there, too, is burning, or is waiting to be burned. The name Seraphim does not come from charity only, writes Aquinas, but from the excess of charity, expressed by the word ardor or fire. Seraph, from the Hebrew saraph, to burn. This sense, fire as excess, ardor, god’s glory, seems particularly present in the English lyric. Paradigmatically, stereotypically maybe, is Hopkins: the world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil. There are also his kingfishers catching fire, his dragonflies drawing flame, the stars, his fire-folk sitting in the air. Of course, everything starts catching fire first in Hopkin’s notebooks, his meticulous daily descriptions of the world. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, wrote Simone Weil. Maybe you get the picture. Or maybe you don’t. But this is where the Christian bit starts to seem like an expression of something more universal, fire as the poetic figure for what happens when one attends intensely enough to the world. But fire, especially imagined as something universal starts to stink the way those timeless words in timeless poems do.

Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moonlight, sunsets and snow, must live a very quiet life, wrote Langston Hughes. Fire might have a bit more of an edge to it, but it so quickly lapses into abstraction and the romantic. The fire in my heart, burning with desire etc. We want real fires, Ryan. I think you can understand. You said you wanted to make high-action, high-intensity content, which represents and unapologetically reaffirms the American spirit. Real fires right? The cops are only building one mock city next door; imagine how many mock cities will burn in blockbusters, rise and fall inside the walls of your studio. Remember what happened when you sent your friend with the tow truck? The one registered to your name? That’s what I’m talking about! I have never known the police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such, continued Hughes, but when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody tells the police. He didn’t mention movie studios, Ryan, but will you still call the police, now that I’ve mentioned yours? Love, roses, moonlight, sunsets, and snow. But Hughes is making a more nuanced point than the abstention from certain topics and words, he’s making an argument about time, or timeliness, against timelessness and universality. Of course, Hughes does write about moonlight in his “Adventures as a Social Poet,” only in the moonlight are klansmen and bodies hanging from trees. Think: you can’t write poems about trees when the forest is full of police. Do you know Brecht? It’s almost like he was writing about our forest, Ryan. Did you know Stokely Carmichael was held for loitering in the old prison on the land next door? What’s the first word that comes to your mind when I write the word tree? What about grave? What about police? One of my favorite poems is instructive here. It’s by Adam David Miller, called “The Hungry Black Child.” It’s a poem about sunsets:

lord

forgive me

if i twist the sunset

but when evening twist my belly

i see red

walking the field in the woods

the houses on my street

white

burning burning

It is a perfect poem. Twists the sunset like Hughes twists the moon. Tells it slant. You must know Dickenson, right? Remember Hopkins here: the world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil. The world flames out in the poet’s mind. Though for Miller, this conflagration coincides with a twisting of the world, a twisting of god’s grandeur into violence or revenge one might worry offends him. If Miller’s god is the same as Hopkin’s pasty chevalier then this might be the case. But I’m not convinced the apology is completely sincere. Or maybe, what rides on the tone of that address is a sort of litmus test. Maybe the poet is sincere, but needlessly so. The question of god, what god, is important even for secular poets, at least those concerned with fire, as angels are the mediators between god’s heaven and the earth. Fire, the mediator between this world now and what comes next. The poet (and I say poet not speaker because this poem is about poetry) is guilty of twisting the sunset. No – that’s it: the asking for forgiveness, it is sincere, humble even, but the poet isn’t convinced his act actually is an affront. If I twist the sunset, he writes. The poet twists the sunset. Or maybe he sets it straight. The poet sets the sunset on fire. Really, the poetic act, the conflagration, comes first from an encounter with the world, here, with hunger: …when evening twist my belly. Even Stevens picked up on something like this when he said the imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. So the poet is twisted first by the world, a particular world, and in attending to that encounter, fully, another world flames out, possibility flames out and the world is charged with it. What makes this poem so specifically about poetry is that it demonstrates this for us. Miller doesn’t explain all this, as I just have, but enacts it for us, in the time of the poem, the time of the now. Through apostrophe and the careful combination of the subject and its form into one spoken substance, Miller has this moment unfold directly before us. Within us. In the space of our minds, our mouths, the event can occur over and over again. Jonathan Culler (despite my commitments, Ryan, I just can’t keep from reading such stuffy critics) argues that the fundamental characteristic of lyric poetry is not the description and interpretation of a past event but the iterative and iterable performance of an event in the lyric present, in the special now, of lyric articulation. The wager, he claims, is that the lyric can displace a time of narrative, of past events reported, and place us in the continuing present of apostrophic address, the now in which, for readers, a poetic event can repeatedly occur.

Fire, Time, Repetition. I hope this is starting to sound like something of a formula, a set of instructions. The now is the time of attention. Prayer, as Weil would have it. The poet attends to the world and the world catches fire. The next world flames out and speaks in this one. Through this one, through a sunset, say, or even the moon. The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come, wrote Walter Benjamin, that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different. This is also to say that every second of time is the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter. The time of the now is the time of the messiah, so to speak. And this now has nothing to do with timelessness, just as communing with and imagining the world to come has less to do with the future, with progress, than with the constellation, redemption, and fulfillment of a whole history of shit and beauty in the present, in this moment, and this moment, and this. Timelessness, Ryan, is the feed, the endless stream of one shit fucking movie after another. It’s an average shot duration of 3.5 seconds. It’s the world of what you call content. It’s the absolute fracturing of attention and the foreclosure of repetition. It’s an obsession with the future that prevents us from ever inhabiting the now. It’s what, along with the cops, keeps the fires out.

What’s important about the now, about poetry, is repetition. Have you ever memorized a poem and recited it by heart? This sort of repetition is important, Ryan, and, whether you know it or not, it’s what your little project, your entire fickle world is against. The expression ‘to lean something by heart,’ writes Byung-Chul Han, tells us that apparently only repetition reaches the heart. He continues, chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition. The neoliberal dispositifs of authenticity, innovation and creativity involve a permanent compulsion to seek the new, but they ultimately only produce variations of the same. I’m sick of the same, Ryan. No more waiting. I want to live in the world, not a movie. I want the world to reach my heart. Maybe this letter (or maybe it’s a poem?) will reach yours. Probably not. Even so, you really ought to pay attention. Read it twice. In this poem, Ryan, everything you own (so much more than one tow truck) is already burning. Now, watch me light the fire again, and again, and again, and again.

Submitted anonymously over email

Posted in Art

Solidarity Tag in Chicago

Posted on August 1, 2022 by scenes


-Received Anonymously Over Email

Posted in ArtTagged chicago, solidarity

Banner Drop in Lenapehoking in Solidarity with the Weelaunee Forest Defenders

Posted on July 29, 2022 by scenes

Here's some video of the radical artwork in Brooklyn showing solidarity with comrades in Atlanta who are fighting to defend the ATL forest & #StopCopCity! pic.twitter.com/Rvx6OgGieV

— Ash J (@AshAgony) July 29, 2022

In solidarity with the week of action to defend the Weelaunee forest, a banner was dropped at Broadway and Havemeyer on occupied Canarsie Lenape Land (so called “Brooklyn NYC”) on Thursday July 28th. It continues to hang there thru Friday afternoon seen by both train-goers and a constant stream of car-users.

The earth and its people will one day be free again! No police, no pipelines, no prisons! Shut Down Rikers! No New Jails.

NYC to ATL❤️‍🔥

-Received Anonymously Over Email

Posted in Art, Community Building, General, Report BacksTagged 4th Week of Action, solidarity

Orlando USA Banner Drop In Solidarity With Forest Defenders

Posted on July 29, 2022 by scenes

In solidarity with forest defenders <3
From Orlando with love and rage! We will carry the spirit of defiance
seen these past months in defense of the wild to the placated streets of
our city. A wild rage has been released, we carry it in our hearts.
The flame burns on!
-1312
ORL to ATL
-Received Anonymously Over Email
Posted in Art, Community Building, General, Report BacksTagged 4th Week of Action, solidarity

DTF Flyers Wheatpasted Throughout The Twin Cities

Posted on July 28, 2022 - July 28, 2022 by scenes


During the fourth week of action to defend the forest, posters were wheat-pasted around several neighborhoods of the Twin Cities.

You can find these posters and more at defendtheatlantaforest.org and making your own wheat-paste is incredibly simple, with recipes easily available online.

-Received Anonymously Over Email

Posted in Art, General, Report BacksTagged 4th Week of Action, solidarity

Banner Drop In Minneapolis USA in solidarity with The Week Of Action To Defend The Weelaunee forest

Posted on July 27, 2022 by scenes

To begin the week of action to defend the Weelaunee forest, a banner was dropped over highway 94 in so-called Minneapolis on Monday July 25th. It remained in place for several hours, including the entire evening rush hour.

Stop Cop City! No Hollywood Dystopia!!

-Received Anonymously Over Email

Posted in Art, General, News, Report BacksTagged 4th Week of Action, solidarity

WOA ANARCHIST BINGO~ DTF ! STOP COP CITY! Fight Blackhall!

Posted on July 24, 2022 - July 24, 2022 by scenes

It’s officially the Week Of Action to collectively Defend the Forest BY HELPING Stop Cop City, & Fight Back Against Black Hall Studios!
There’s a bunch of folks in town & what better way to spend our time than collectively, and with a diversity of tactics fight our enemies both INSIDE & OUTSIDE the forest, and spread the resources of the cops & Black Hall thin…
Please help us gitr’ dun by trying to complete at least one “BINGO” line of A-team comrade tasks while so many folks are in up in this bish!
Remember your op sec & tech sec skills & training & get out there to start tallying off items on your to-do list for the cause!
The forest won’t defend itself from the oppressive regimes of law enforcement, & clearly petitions & shit are not enough!
*NO PASSIVE PARTICPANTS IN THE FINAL BATTLES FOR EARTH & FREEDOM.
TOTAL LIBERATION MEANS MAKE TOTAL DESTROY– so we can build the world we want to live in from the ashes of the old!
On the above A-TEAM BINGO Sheet, you have to utilize some deductive reasoning, be creative, & show us what you got!
All fires are sacred. Everything wild is better. Earth destroying equipment, their operators & people who guard them fearing to enter forest is one of many noble goals…

– Received Anonymously Over Email

Posted in Art, Calls to Action, Community Building, GeneralTagged 4th Week of Action, diy, joy

Ant gang moves 2 ton barricade of public park

Posted on July 21, 2022 - July 22, 2022 by scenes

It takes 100 cute little ants working together to type a communique. Imagine how many ants it takes to move a 4,000 lb concrete barricade! That’s what we accomplished last night, the evening of the 19th. Ryan Milsap wanted to close Intrenchment Creek Park to the public and thought that some 2 ton concrete barricades would do the trick. But he just had no idea how many ants love to come and go from the park and love to work together to make a nicer place for the whole community. Fuck Milsap, Fuck Blackhall, and FUCK THE COPS!

Love to you all,
Ant Gang

-Received Anonymously Over Email

Posted in Art, Community Building, GeneralTagged blackhall

A poem to be read by two people:

Posted on June 22, 2022 by scenes
Everyone has a name and an address.
We live in your walls.
Can the company face the financial burden?
Every day a new set of windows, cleaning up paint, fixing smoke damage, loss of assets.
Will employees stay when faced with increased pressure.
Rumors around the office that there’s a list of addresses and information, then someone wakes up to protestors outside their house, someone else’s car stops working but they’ve had it for awhile and they don’t maintain it, but they freak out, someone has their neighborhood flyer-ed with their face. name, address, their cellphone number, and where they work, someone else has their church visited, someone else gets confronted at a restaurant, and someone else their grocery store run at 2pm on Monday after Yoga and before their therapy appointment.
People start quitting and the pay raises can’t soothe their anxieties. One day you arrive to the office and the windows are broken and the office covered in paint. The company has to close it’s office while repairs are made. Your companies files get leaked online and the bank account gets drained from an anonymous hacker.
This is happening all over the country. Whoever is doing this… they’re everywhere. Will it stop?
Only if you drop the contract
-Received anonymously over email
Posted in ArtTagged diy, public speaking

New Truck Blockade In Atlanta Forest

Posted on June 5, 2022 by scenes

A new truck blockade has been placed and liberated from it’s machinic existence on one of the cops favorite paths south of their firing range into the forest. ALL ROADS ARE THE BEGINING OF THE END. FIRE TO THE MACHINES!!!
**Defend the Forest**

-Received anonymously over email

Posted in Art, Community Building, General, News, Report Backs

Video Submission

Posted on June 2, 2022 by scenes

pic.twitter.com/2DlNDD7PEB

— Scenes from the Atlanta Forest (@scenesatl) June 2, 2022

-Received anonymously over email

Posted in Art, GeneralTagged direct action, diy, ecodefense, joy, protest, sabotage, solidarity

WANTED POSTER

Posted on May 23, 2022 - May 25, 2022 by scenes

-Received anonymously over email

Posted in Art, GeneralTagged police, tips

Poem By An Animal In The Weelaunee Forest

Posted on May 21, 2022 - June 17, 2022 by scenes

welaunee forest

“may 19”

daylight
earth-killer oil and steel
rips root tears tree
destroy life for progress

land scarred
night falls
silence

“may 20”

yellow moon watching
soft steps searching
i hunt
stalking

quick
spark
flame growing dancing
run
slip into shadow
fuel tank explodes
echoes
a smile
joy

sun rises
scorched steel beast broken
fire from life
life from fire
forever

the wild always has its revenge
swift sudden silent
beware

-a coyote

-Received Anonymously Over Email

Posted in Art, CommuniquesTagged direct action, ecodefense, joy, sabotage

from nyc to atl: defend the atl forest

Posted on May 18, 2022 - May 18, 2022 by scenes

Posted in ArtTagged joy

A Fearful Conversation over dinner

Posted on April 26, 2022 - April 26, 2022 by scenes

The first of hopefully many fictional accounts of the Defend The Atlanta Forest Movement. This is a one scene play. Please perform this in any of the following locations: the forest, the front lawn of the High Museum, or in front of the Atlanta Police Foundation office.

Characters: Dean Reeves. Patty Reeves

Scene

Patty is standing by the table with two plates full of meat. Dean enters from stage right.

Dean: I just got off the phone Heinrich and MuchoMachoMan will start being given round the clock secuirty starting next week.

The two sit down at the table.

Patty: Oh Dean I haven’t been able to eat in days and I don’t think today will be any different.

Dean: Didn’t you hear what I just said? MuchoMachoMan is safe now.

Patty: How can you think secuirty makes him safer? Was there security when Forest Defenders went to your office? Was there security when Forest Defenders sabatoged those machines at your work site?

Dean stands up from the table fists clinched.

Dean: Now you listen to me Patty. In May Reeves Young is supposed to start chopping those trees down; this is going to get worse before it gets better. Who knows what Forest Defenders will do when we try to cut the trees down.

Patty stands up, tears in her eyes.

Patty: Do you hear yourself Dean? How could it get worse? Forest Defenders already have beencto our house and put that banner up. I can’t live in fear anymore Dean. The Forest Defenders they know our names. They know our addresses. We don’t even need the money; we’re millionaires and your business has plenty of other contracts.

Dean falls to his knees.

Dean: Fine Patty you win, the Forest Defenders win. The Forest Defenders will just have to stop another company like they did us.

Patty and Dean both sit down at the table.

Patty: Oh Dean thank you so much. Now I can eat this horse meat for dinner

Dean: It’s delicious honey. MuchoMachoMan’s children are the tastiest horses imaginable.

End scene.

Posted in Art, Community Building, General

The Atlanta Forest: an incomplete map

Posted on December 25, 2021 - December 25, 2021 by scenes

Map of the tract of forest bounded by Constitution, Key, and Bouldercrest roads.
We’ve been cooking it up all winter and we’re finally done. Check out our homemade map, made just for forest exploration. You can use it to walk the forest and report anything that doesn’t look right to the forest threat tipline! You might notice that this map is incomplete- that’s ok, because a complete map of the forest would be… very packed. If you notice anything that’s incorrect though, please report it via our submission form. If you know about another useful map, please submit them if you can’t find them on our new maps page!

Posted in ArtTagged maps, originals

An experience of collective joy in the Atlanta forest.

Posted on November 10, 2021 - December 26, 2021 by scenes
@defendatlantaforest

An experience of collective joy in the Atlanta forest. #defendtheatlantaforest #nocopcity #stopcopcity #plur #fyp #acab #rave

♬ I Think of Saturday – Moodymann

Posted in Art, Community BuildingTagged joy, source:tiktok

This is our place to share what we're up to in the Forest.

And it's a submission-based platform, so you should send us

  • Upcoming events
  • Art & photos
  • Recipes
  • Maps & trails
  • Writing
  • Natural remedies
  • Communiques
  • Songs & poetry
  • Report backs
  • Whatever else

Pretty much all forest-related content is more than welcome. Please don't send any personally-identifying photos or videos.

Send submissions by email to scenesatl@protonmail.com (please encrypt with our PGP key) or head to the submissions page.

Follow our Kolektiva

A word of advice

Cops & feds are out here (on the interweb). You should practice good security culture by only submitting to this site or the email while using a secure network like Tor, ideally on top of a secure operating system like Tails or Whonix. If you are sending to the email use an end-to-end encrypted email service like Protonmail, or a single use, throwaway email like tempr.email.
Learn more about digital security culture from CrimethInc, the NAALPO, or the EFF.

  • (RE-POST:) A CALL TO REJECT FASCIST CREEP IN THE WEELAUNEE FOREST
  • ATLAS OFFICE ATTACKED WITH POWERFUL STENCH AGENT
  • NO FASH IN THE FOREST
  • US BANK AND WELLS FARGO SMASHED FOR TORTUGUITA AND TYRE NICHOLS
  • MARCH/VIGIL IN VANCOUVER, CANADA
Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: micro, developed by DevriX.