The Community Gallery

here you are singing

by Jami Reimer and Sarah Ens, 2025

here you are singing is a collaborative composition that follows the flight paths of grassland bird field recordings, oral history interviews, choral singing, poetry, and music to evoke and interrogate ideas of home. An adaptation of Sarah Ens's award-winning book-length poem Flyway (Turnstone Press), this interdisciplinary and immersive sound installation traces questions of migration and memory, displacement and settlement in a time of climate emergency and global refugee crisis. Spatialized through four different speakers, mothers speak Plautdietsch to their children huddled in bomb shelters, a dawn chorus of prairie birds rings out at the 1875 landing site of Mennonite immigrants to Manitoba, a cherished accordion is carried across international borders, and stories of family, loss, war, and survival are shared around kitchen tables.

The tall grass prairie is the most endangered ecosystem in North America and a habitat crucial to the survival of many at-risk plant, bird, insect, and amphibian species. here you are singing invites audience members to step into a sound-world of what remains of the tall grass prairie in Manitoba—in the wake of colonization and the spread of industrial agriculture—and encounter the songs of asylum seekers who call this place home.

Related Events

• Opening Event June 13, 6:00-9:00 PM, talk back at 7:00 PM
• Here You Are: Creating & Connecting with Creation – a place-based creative community listening workshop. Led by Sarah Ens & Jami Reimer, featuring artists Sarah Hodges-Kolisnyk and Karen Cornelius. June 10, 7:00–9:00 PM. Tickets $20.

Printed from: www.cmu.ca/gallery/community-gallery