For Okwui Enwezor, the void of Ground Zero indexes the full manifestation of a Fanonian “tabula rasa” in which the entropic unleashing of excessive violence weakens and dissolves the “dead certainties” of the formerly stable Western liberal/imperial global order. Such systemic crises present an unforeseen possibility for the global majority, a “founding moment,” wherein subsequent structural reconfigurations allow for their demands to be more fully articulated. These articulated demands necessarily include artistic and cultural responses, which, Enwezor observes, “posit a radical departure from the system of hegemony that fuels the present struggle.”

If, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, “climate apartheid” is on the rise, then Cop City Atlanta offers an ominous flashpoint. For not only is Cop City an exemplary story of the violent repression of community activism at the nexus of abolition, decolonization, and environmentalism; it also spotlights the forces of counterinsurgency that are operating to prevent any political transformation beyond the status quo. If the environmentalist movement is losing in the struggle to stop world-ending climate change, then continuing to focus on practices of ecological repair is increasingly myopic, even escapist, without taking into account the forces blocking any meaningful change.