Julie Weitz, Prayer for Burnt Forests
an artist talk and film screening
May • 3 • 2023 | 3:30 - 5 PM McCormick Screening Room 1070 Humanities Gateway
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. The film was commissioned by The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, as part of Weitz’s solo exhibition GOLEM: A Call to Action (2021-2022) which featured three video artworks that draw on Jewish allegory, folklore, 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.
Currently, Weitz is developing Prayer for Burnt Forests (PFBF) into a community-centered event that stages interactive performances in forests impacted by wildfires to help affected communities across the American West process their grief through shared artistic experiences. This quarter, Weitz will be leading a PFBF workshop event for UCI community members in conjunction Art History 140B, “Sublime Landscapes and the Changing Climate,” taught by Marianna Davison. Weitz’s talk and workshop are organized by UCI’s California Wildfire Project (CWP), as part of a year-long Living with Wildfire initiative.
In 2021, Weitz began teaching meditation, breathwork, and yoga to firefighters at The Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), a non-profit organization based in Pasadena, CA that provides career support to formerly incarcerated firefighters who are interested in careers in the Wildland and Forestry sector. Previously in 2019, Weitz received her basic wildland firefighter training at an artist residency program hosted by the University of California Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station in Tahoe National Forest (Washoe).
This year, UCI’s California Wildfire Project and the Department of Art History are hosting Weitz’s community-centered art initiative and oral history project, “Holy Sparks: Interviews with Wildland Firefighters,” which centers the voices and images of formerly incarcerated firefighters with the FFRP. The project brings to light the firefighters’ contributions to protecting the lands and communities threatened by catastrophic wildfire in California and the systemic challenges they face, while also raising awareness about the need for more mental health education and resources for wildland firefighters and underrepresented communities at the front lines of the climate crisis.
Julie Weitz is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Working across film, performance art, installation, drawing, and photography, her work synthesizes elements from Yiddish folktales, feminist performance art, clowning, and silent film to make powerful, and often political statements about the world and the project of humanity’s survival. Weitz’s artwork has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, BOMB, and Hyperallergic. Her solo exhibition GOLEM: A Call to Action debuted at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA in 2021-2022. Weitz is a Fulbright Scholar (2023-2024), Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow at Yiddishkayt (2020-2023), and a Cultural Trailblazer of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (2020-2021). In the past, Weitz has received support from the Coaxial Foundation for the Arts, Innovation Foundation, the California Center for Cultural Innovation, LAXART, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, the Banff Centre, Asylum Arts, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Weitz currently teaches art in Los Angeles and regularly contributes to Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA). Follow her @mygolem_is_here