Julie Weitz

Prayer for Burnt Forests

a short film and oral history project highlighting our collective resilience in the aftermath of catastrophic wildfire

2021-2023

Prayer for Burnt Forests is a film and public art initiative that extends upon the ethical imperative of tikkun olam (to heal the world) by upholding the land’s right to rest and recuperation. Together with Rabbi Zach Fredman, Weitz created a prayer intended to be read and delivered in nature as a gesture of respect, restoration, and genesis. In the film, a mythological golem traverses the recently-charred forests of Tongva land in Southern California, performing the prayer as a ritual dance. Prayer for Burnt Forests was commissioned by The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, as part of Weitz’s solo exhibition GOLEM: A Call to Action (2021-2022) curated by Heidi Rabben and Qianjin Montoya. The exhibition featured three of Weitz’s video artworks that draw on Jewish allegory and spiritual practice to confront societal and ecological disasters.

In Weitz’s videos, ecology is framed within the traditional Jewish concept of fire as a force for hope and as a foundational element in spiritual ritual. In a modern twist, however, Golem’s fire is specifically a decolonizing “cultural fire,” which connects her religious awakening to California’s Indigenous practices of fire ecology. As a diasporic justice-seeker, Golem adapts her culture’s ancient traditions with contemporary urgency, while honoring local communities, the land, and long-established local practices. At stake is the larger conviction that advocacy for traditional ecological knowledge, combined with ancient Jewish practices, can be a powerful means of healing and reshaping climate and land management policy.

Weitz reframes the California landscape from an exploitable resource to a sacred entity, asserting Indigenous wisdom through the cipher of Jewish folklore and spirituality.

-Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles

In 2019, Weitz received her basic wildland firefighter training at an art residency organized by the University of California Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station in Tahoe National Forest (Washoe). A year later, she began working with the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), teaching yoga and mindfulness meditation to formerly incarcerated firefighters. In her classes, Weitz integrates wildland firefighting terminology with somatic practices, offering the firefighters hands-on methods for managing the stress of working on fire incidents.

In 2023, Weitz initiated Holy Sparks: Interviews with Wildland Firefighters, an oral history project that collects the voices and images of formerly incarcerated firefighters to highlight the firefighters’ contributions to protecting the lands and communities threatened by catastrophic wildfire in California. The project was commissioned by University of California Irvine’s Wildfire Project and will be archived in the UCI Libraries Oral History Collection.

Holy Sparks was also a panel discussion that took place in conjunction with the exhibition GOLEM: A Call to Action at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. As wildfires continue to rage across the globe, Weitz posed questions to a dynamic group of fire practitioners and spiritual leaders about how to reframe our relationship to fire through a cultural and spiritual lens. Sharing personal stories about working with and relating to fire, each speaker offered their unique perspectives on how we can collectively reshape our approach to confronting catastrophic fire. At stake in the conversation is a perceptual shift around our social responsibility and awareness in addressing the well-being of frontline communities, as well as the land, as we confront the worst wildfires seasons on record.

This project was filmed, photographed, and conducted on Tongva Land.

To support the rematriation of Tongva please consider a guest offering to the Tongva Tah-rah’-hat Paxaavxa Conservancy.